This inverview, conducted by Pascal Gielen and Sonja Lavaert, was originally published in Open! Platform for Art, Culture & the Public Domain

Pascal Gielen & Sonja Lavaert: Our book Commonism is about the triangle of ideology, aestheticsand the commons.1 Our tentative assumption is that commonism may be the next meta-ideology, after neoliberalism. We understand ideology not only negatively as a false awareness, but also positively as a logic of faith that connects fiction and reality and can make people long for and work towards a better form of living together. In Assembly you and Michael Hardt do something similar with notions such as ‘entrepreneurship’, ‘institution’, ‘leadership’. What does ‘ideology’ mean to you and do you think it may also figure in a positive narrative?

Antonio Negri: In my experience, ideology tends to have mostly negative connotations, or, rather, I have regarded ‘ideology’ mainly in negative terms. This means though that we are speaking of something that is real. Ideology is a real fact. In addition, it is something real that embodies, shapes and constitutes reality. What I see as positive in this embodiment of reality is critique – which can be critique of the ideology or of reality – and the dispositive, understood as the transition of the world of thinking to that of reality. In my view, ideologies make up reality, but I use the term preferably when discussing its negative aspect, whereas when I speak of its positive aspect, i.e., the critique or the dispositive, I prefer these latter words.

The ideological dimension is absolutely crucial when thinking about reality and in trying to analyse and understand it, but, again, it can be both positive and negative. Gramsci, for example, saw it this way. The ideological dimension is an essential part of any analysis of reality, but a discourse on ideology is therefore always both positive and negative. On the one hand there is the bourgeois ideology (that Gramsci opposed, as do we) and on the other hand there is the communist ideology (that we support). Today, I think it is better to call the communist ideology a ‘critique’ or ‘dispositive’; ‘critique’ as in taking place in the realm of knowledge and understanding, and ‘dispositive’ in the Foucaultian sense of the transition of knowledge into action.

And, well, there is the matter of meta-ideology… Again, I agree with your view that ideology, being something that belongs to the realm of knowledge and understanding, in a sense branches out into reality, feeding and shaping it, and that therefore ideology is always and everywhere present in concrete reality. However, I would be very reluctant to speak in terms of ‘meta’, ‘post’ or ‘after’, as if it were something transcendent or as if there is such a thing as a space of transcendence at all.

When we speak of meta-ideology, we refer to the tendency of transcending the traditional party political differences between left and right. It is a trend that can be seen clearly today, wherever the theme of the common is picked up or where common-initiatives are being developed. And elsewhere as well: liberal politicians write books about the importance of the basic income; neonationalism presents itself as a longing for social cohesion; religiously inspired political parties emphasize communion and the community, et cetera.

Common is not the exclusive property of the left, that much is clear. Looking at history from a Marxist perspective, we see how it was precisely the commons that were transformed by capitalism to be financially profitable. Capitalism’s attitude towards the commons is about expropriation, exploration, creating surplus value, and the dominion that is founded on these things. The common exists in two major forms: there are natural commons and social commons and, as Michael and I put forth in Assembly, these can be subdivided into five types: the earth and ecosystems; the immaterial common of ideas, codes, images and cultural products; material goods produced by cooperative labour; metropolises and rural areas that are the domain of communication, cultural interaction and cooperation; and social institutions and services that provide housing, welfare, healthcare and education. Now the essential characteristic of the present-day economy and society is that the social production of the commons is being exploited by capital. The struggle of the commons therefore is working people re-appropriating that of which they were robbed by capital. Re-appropriating what was taken from them and putting it to work for the benefit of the common: that is the meaning of liberation and emancipation. This also means that the fiction of ‘post’ or ‘meta’ is debunked and eliminated. There is no meta. The struggle of the commons is the possibility of eliminating an ‘outside’ (meta [above], post [after]). This struggle is exclusively fought in the domain of immanence, meaning: here and now, at the heart of the reality in which we find ourselves, because there is no ‘outside’. By the way, we can only speak in the abstract about common as a general unitary, singular and exactly definable concept, because in reality the common is always twofold, just like labour is.

There is much talk about ‘common’ nowadays; studies are undertaken, and various movements and schools of thought have emerged around the theme. Here in France, for example, there is the school of the economist Benjamin Coriat, editor of Le retour des communs (2015); we have Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, who posit the common as a demand and alternative in their Commun (2014), and Carlo Vercellone and other comrades – and Michael and myself are two of them – who regard the common as something that can be used ontologically, can be annexed, and for whom the struggle therefore consists of re-appropriating the common. This also ties in with David Harvey’s reading of Marx. In Assembly we concern ourselves in great detail with his analysis and for the most part we agree with him. However, whereas Harvey focuses on capitalism as a continuous primitive accumulation, we see it as a developmental phase and therefore prefer to speak of formal and real subsumption, but this perhaps is a different theme.

What I’m trying to say is: my distrust of the term ‘meta’ is that it suggests that there is no difference or antithesis anymore between left and right. Well, of course left and right are inaccurate concepts, but to put it more plainly: it means that capitalism is no longer recognised and that being liberated of capitalism is regarded as something that could easily happen or would even be a battle that is already won.

To give a concrete example of how we use the term ‘meta’: the occupation of Syntagma Square in Athens in 2011 was predominantly organized by the left, but people from quite different ideological backgrounds are also joining the movement and are developing new initiatives, out of necessity, for their daily survival. For that reason, this movement, which is really more of a patchwork of initiatives, is sometimes ‘accused’ of being apolitical. In that sense we call commonism a practice-based ideology and we call it ‘meta’ because it brings together people from various, traditionally opposed political currents, and does so out of necessity.

I fully agree with that conclusion and analysis, but I would still be wary of using such an ambiguous term. The word ‘meta’ covers a political concern aimed at reconciliation with regard to the profound rift between, to put it bluntly, the bosses and those who are exploited.

What do you think of the fact that the Open VLD, the liberal party in Flanders, is organizing a conference about the commons as apparently they think it is important, without necessarily wanting to capitalize it but, as things look now anyway, because they are genuinely interested or find something lacking in their liberal system?

It is obvious that we are facing enormous problems nowadays. We see a general transformation of the system of production as it is being automated and robotized. These are things that we thematized and analysed in our operaismo movement, some forty years or longer ago. In the first issue of Potere Operaio, in 1969, we demanded the ‘civil income’ (reddito di cittadinanza) and this was because we already foresaw this process in which labour would be reduced to a completely secondary element. The question is how to respond to this revolution and reality and as far as that is concerned I see an urgent need to create spaces for developing initiatives outside of capitalism.

There are a number of interesting initiatives in Belgium: the start-ups, with already 50,000 participants, and Michel Bauwens, the founder of the P2P Foundation. And yes, the commons is a domain that very much interests ‘the right’. The same goes for social democrats, by the way. So, the entire problem consists of understanding what the alternative could be, how to respond, what to do, and this is in fact the very theme of autonomy.

In our research and book we speak of aesthetics not only in regard to art but also in relation to society. We understand aesthetics as the shaping or design of both material and social things, of people. In your book Assembly we detect a similar idea: assembly characterizes the aesthetic style and strategy of the commons. Likewise, in Commonism, we oppose the aesthetic figure with the abstraction that we associate with exchange value, finance capitalism and neoliberalism. What does the ideal assembly look like, in your view? What are the conditions for its realization? How can non-humans (things, nature) be involved in an assembly? What instruments or strategies are needed? In short, how should assembly be practically organized in order to function well, in your view?

We argue that the assembly is already there. It is already there in the structure of the present-day economy in which labour has transformed itself in language and in cooperation that is largely autonomous. The assembly is what we are confronted with. The problem therefore is how these labour forces or subjects / people who produce subjectivity can become political subjects. This is demonstrated by the recognition of the common, by the transition to the common and being together, by the transition of the mere finding of being together to being aware of it. The transition of collaboration and being-in-common to the production of common subjectivity is the central element of the assembly.

The comrades and activists who take part in the fight of the movement, from Occupy Wall Street to the Indignados in Madrid, have attempted to bring about such a transition, especially from the condition of people producing under capitalism and whose situation simply happens to them to a free condition in which the common is built and formed. This transition is fundamental and in addition it demonstrates that commonism is much more feasible today than in the previous situation, in which the workers were organized and brought together by capital. Before, the workers were brought together, they did not come together of their own initiative. This is no longer the case and precisely this means an enormous boost for the possibilities. The possibility for liberation is infinitely larger and wider today, because there is this being-together, an ontological fact that is also a point of departure.

The assembly is an ontological fact that must become political, that is the heart of the matter.

Marx has said of the working classes that they were made by capital and that therefore it was necessary for them to become aware of their situation through a political party, an external organization, an ideology, et cetera, in order to become political. Today we see a maturity and an original organization, so to speak, thanks to the transformation that occurred in labour and society. Labour today is no longer a labour under command. The aspect of the command is becoming increasingly alienated from the possibility to work together subjectively. What is important, is that the language that is formed by the worker comes before the command, precedes it. The importance of neoliberalism, by the way, is that it understood that this autonomous use of language can be reversed and can be made use of by capital. This is why the most important political work of today is to recognize this subjective and special use of language and to reverse again what capitalism and neoliberalism have reversed, and to bring about the liberation.

We are still not quite convinced, in the sense that we miss a concrete definition of what assembly exactly is. Looking at this as a sociologists, we look at examples of assemblies such as the Ex Asilo Filangieri in Naples, and we think: assembly is a tool, a meeting method, a more democratic way of organizing things, of taking autonomous decisions, of achieving self-governance. Can we say that assembly is a formula for organizing direct democracy?

What Michael and I have in mind is exactly the type of phenomenon like L’Asilo in Naples, where sovereignty has been reversed: to the common, to a space and a series of shared goods (beni communi) in the widest sense, both material and immaterial goods. In other words, where a series of remarkable initiatives is undertaken for the common good. The concept of common is always a production, something that is invented, made, shaped. The assembly is this: a body of people, a small multitude that manages well the shared (material and immaterial) goods and thereby constitutes a common. The fundamental concept of assembly is that the political and social are again joined and today we have a chance, an opportunity to do this. Unlike Lenin, we no longer find ourselves in exceptional conditions like it was with the Russian Revolution when there was only hunger, war and catastrophe and everything had to be torn down in order to create a new force. Now, today, we have the opportunity to transform the assembly into a force. Because that is politics: lending force. Or, that is aesthetics, if one wishes to use that term: lending form and force. There is no form without force. Politics is force, power – and that includes the aspect of violence. In politics it is about the force (the power, sometimes violence) to construct peace.

What we see in the practical functioning of assembly, for example, is that the practice of language becomes very important. After all, people have to speak to each other and try to convince others through dialogue. Now this mechanism has two problems: 1) those who speak more and better have an advantage in winning the debate; and 2) there is a class phenomenon. In the situation of an assembly the middle class becomes dominant: those who are white, educated and can speak well have the floor, so there is an element of selection. My question to you is: how can the assembly be organized in such a way that there is no such selection or that this shortcoming is compensated for by letting basis-democratic principles prevail? How does one give a voice to those who remain silent?

We are of course discussing examples and I think that especially in Naples, if one looks at the periphery, in the surrounding region, in all those places where the casa del popolo are strong and many initiatives are taken by the people, one definitely sees a direct proletarian use of language, and in quite dominant forms. There are also initiatives such as L’Asilo that already have quite a tradition, that have statutes and a legal structure. And yes, in those cases a certain political class is involved. However, I think that the assembly is both cause and product of a break with class distinction. The obvious objection one could have against these assembly initiatives is that not everything has been properly defined. We are after all speaking of a process that is not free of contradictions and downfall, but it is an extremely important process and it has begun.

The problem is that we have to develop a different model than that of parliamentary democracy, or, rather, we need a post-parliamentarian model of democracy.

What do you think of the fact that in Naples a commissioner for the commons (assessore dei beni communi) has been appointed? We ask this specifically with regard to your rejection of state institutions.

We cannot have this discussion with Naples as an example. The situation there is quite ambiguous. What is happening there now was achieved with great effort after an immense political crisis: the PD(Democratic Party) in Naples is divided into four or five factions, the 5 Stelle movement is weak, and there is this incredible Mayor Luigi de Magistris, a former magistrate – very straight and tough – who is open to what according to him might constitute the majority. So all this makes Naples a rather unique case, a confluence of events. There are so many contingent factors playing a part there. The first concern of the comrades who occupied buildings was therefore to obtain a guarantee, an anchoring in the institutions.

But to return to our point, the institutions are indeed a major problem, but we should not concern ourselves with the case of Naples as it is very much a separate case.

 In Assembly you regard the new leadership of the commons as a possible strategy of the multitude and as a tactic of the leader. The leader can only temporarily – and depending on her or his expertise – make certain tactical moves in the general strategy of the multitude. How can this be organized and in how much is your reversal of attribution of the strategy (to the multitude) and of tactics (to the leader) different from a representative democracy where leaders are also only appointed temporarily?

I think that we are faced with the problem of removing or eroding the political relationship between movement and leader. What is at stake is decision authority. What exactly was the formula of political parties? A party gathered a great number of people along a certain political line that was decided upon by the top, by the leader, and which was literally imposed on or taught to the people in a top-down fashion. In our work, Michael and I take the critique by movements as our starting point, because these movements reject the existing institutions. Today, we have to reject leadership but not necessarily institutions as such. So we are now faced with the problem of the institutions and we have to solve this, we have to face this, and study it together. Or, in other words: we have to bring back the leadership to the movement and it is within the movement that the hegemonial strategy of leadership must be developed. We have to take the decision authority away from the leader, or rather, take the abstraction and transcendence of the decision away from the leader.

But how does one choose the leader, and how do the commons differ from representative democracy?

The problem is not how to choose, as this can be done in any number of ways. The problem is that of the power that is given to the leader. Often though, the leader will spontaneously emerge from the multitude.

The power of the leader must be limited to the tactical level and this usually means the power to make proposals.

Anyone who has been active within the movement knows the phenomenon of the leader who spontaneously comes forward. It has to do with the actual needs and problems the movement faces and into which the leader has more insight than anyone else. One often sees how a leader’s power is acknowledged at some point and then begins, works out well, and thus becomes a reality.

Let me give an example. During the 1917 revolution, Lenin succeeded in becoming the tactical leader because he could instantly, in a very direct manner, provide answers to two problems that presented itself at the time: peace now, and land to the farm labourers. However, on the other hand, the powers representing the military and the farmers were convinced that neither the soldiers nor the farm labourers were ready for these changes and so they didn’t undertake any action. It was a paradox: the leader, Lenin, saying no to the ruling institutions because he understood what the soldiers and the farm labourers needed. This is a tactic that becomes power and force (forza).

The leader is always temporary, tactical. He steps forward in a struggle of the people / subjects who have demands and needs.

But then how does the leader know what those needs are? Simply because they stem from the people?

Quite so. He knows what is needed because he is part of it, because he is in the middle of it, but, again, this is a paradox. According to the official history books Lenin was a demagogue who played games with the people, but I know that the reverse is true: the revolution succeeded because Lenin understood that these were the real needs and because he immediately articulated an answer to them, without all the compromises, crippling detours and institutions as created by the parliamentary system. Those real needs to which he provided an answer were peace now, immediately, and giving the land to those who worked the land, without any compromise. 

The same is true for many leaders. Churchill, for example, took a direct decision to fight against the Germans in World War II. This is the point: the leader who immediately and directly coincides with the needs and wants of the many / the common.

In Assembly you defend the hypothesis that the institutions or the leader don’t need a centralized rule but that they can be realized by a multitude in a democratic manner. The examples you provide for the future of the movements are in line with this hypothesis: for example, Black Lives Matter. But isn’t this notion and aren’t these examples at odds with or even contrary to your criticism of the ‘horizontal leader-lessness’?

Well, many movements are leaderless, but that is not the issue. What is problematic, or what these movements need, is institutions. What we are trying to say is not so much that movements need leaders – as, again, they should take charge of leadership themselves – but that they do need institutions. It is a mistake for these movements not to have an institution, to not adopt an institutional framework. However, Michael and I are convinced that within the movements there is a tendency to do this, to form institutions – these are not anarchist groups – and thereby realize this horizontal hegemony. Our work is about searching for a type of institution that is not sovereign and is not connected to ownership. How this works out in practice, well, that is exactly what we need to discuss, think about, try out…

This leads nicely to our next question. You advocate complementarity of the three political strategies: pre-figurative politics, antagonistic reformism and hegemony. Existing institutions are abolished and new, non-sovereign institutions are created. What exactly needs to be abandoned when it comes to existing institutions?

We are currently witnessing the death struggle of the concepts that have dominated political thinking and practice in the nineteenth and twentieth century. The most important of these dying concepts are national sovereignty and property, both private and public. National sovereignty has been beaten by globalized capitalism, but at the same time actual capitalism is founded on those same barely surviving concepts that influence and mutually confirm each other. The concept or principle on which national sovereignty is based, in particular the ‘border’, has really become absurd. We transcend and cross borders constantly. Our brains are globalized and have no more use for the concept of border, so we need to get rid of it. That is the theoretical work that needs to be done: giving short shrift to moribund principles and concepts such as the border. As abundantly clear as this is for national sovereignty, so it is for ownership, both private and public: ownership is based on the same logic as the border, an obsolete concept that is at odds with reality. Even more so: property and border are one and the same thing.

The concept of the common, by contrast, is not one of ownership. In thinking about this issue it is extremely important to make a distinction between ‘common goods’ (beni comuni), which can be the object of ownership, and ‘the common’ (il comune) as in ‘commonwealth’, which is a production, something that is formed by the common from within and which consequently cannot be owned.

Is there anything positive you could mention about what these new ‘non-sovereign’ institutions might look like? How should the three political strategies – pre-figurative politics, antagonistic reformism and hegemony over the institutions – work together exactly? Is there a sequence that these three strategies should follow, or should they be deployed in parallel?

That is a question of the political practice. I simply can’t answer that, as it is too hard to do this sitting at a writing desk. It is both impossible and undesirable. I don’t see it as part of my work, which is studying, philosophizing, providing general frameworks in a critical manner, studying the foundation of the discourse, questioning the principles and concepts. And then there is the practice of the struggle and it is within the struggle that debate and consultation should take place, among each other, about what should be done. We cannot be expected to predict the future, and it is not our ambition to do so. To me this is one of the core issues: we will have to wait until the future announces itself, breaks out. That takes place in practice, whereas in my work I wish to point out directions, and formulate a critique of the principles of ideas and structures.

In Assembly you quote Hegel: ‘Everything turns on grasping and expressing the True not only as aSubstance, but equally as Subject’.2 What exactly is subjectivity to you? Does subjectivity take on a different form today and if so, what does it look like?

To Hegel, subjectivity meant synthesis and overcoming. Think of Alexandre Kojève’s interpretation of the master-slave dialectic: the slave overcomes the master in as far as he serves him and at the same time constructs him. Also think of the concept of the proletariat in relation to capitalism in the work of the young Marx: the proletariat forms itself and realizes its project in as far as it becomes a fully integrated part of the bourgeois society. In Capital we no longer find this interpretation, and it is also gone from or at least nuanced in our analysis of the reality of workers today. Today, the subjectivity of the worker is that of singularity, of a particularity that is being produced in the construction of the common. This particularity is invention, is immaterial and serves to construct the common, that is, a bringing together of all these things. The (worker’s) subjectivity of today is a production of ‘being’, as it is an innovation and a surplus. It is a practice of freedom and therefore the production of subjectivity is something that transcends any identity. The subject is non-identic, is not an identity (hence the impossibility of providing exact definitions for it). The subject is formed in the collaboration, in being social, and it is something historical.

How do you see the role of art and the art world in the organization of assembly? On the one hand we state that the art world today indeed has a role by creating a space for exchange and debate, which is lacking in mainstream media, at exhibitions and during biennales. On the other hand we conclude that it doesn’t go any further and that these initiatives remain limited to the domain of the discursive. Also, these initiatives are often used as PR tools, turning the debate into a commodity. In light of this, what role can the art world – and art itself – play according to you, and can it have a role at all in shaping and strengthening the commons?

As I have tried to clarify in my book Art and Multitude (1989), art can always be linked to its mode of production. Art is production. Its dignity is derived from the fact that it is production of ‘being’, of meaningful images. In other words, of images that shape ‘being’, that take ‘being’ out of a hidden condition and transform it into an open and public condition. This always happens during a process of production. This is why there is an analogy between how goods are produced in general in a certain historical context and how art is produced in that same context. In art there is always a ‘making’ in the sense of constructing something. Art is always a form of building, a bringing together, a productive gesture. When looking at things from this point of view, it becomes clear that it is all about making distinctions within this world. There is beautiful art and there is ugly art, useful art and useless art; likewise there is art that markets itself as a commodity and there is art that is a form of productive artistic making.

Like language, art produces communication, it makes connections. Especially nowadays, art is like the practice of language in constructing connections, becoming event. Art is getting rid of materiality and is increasingly linked to immaterial production. It follows the same trend as the immaterial production and makes connections in fluid, unstable, and new images, in unexpected forms and figures. In this way art affiliates itself with the present-day mode of production and, like this mode of production, it interprets behaviour that is related to special events and passions. We are in a phase of metamorphosis of art, just like we are in phase of the production mode in which labour is completely transforming itself.

With regard to art I would like to underline two things. First, I assume that art is a form of making and working that is therefore completely linked to the production mode of a specific historical situation. Second, I assume that art has the capacity to produce ‘being’. Of course not all art always produces real ‘being’. By this I absolutely do not mean that there is good and bad art; that is not for me to say. But I do think a distinction can be made between art that serves the market and that is produced and circulates within the market, and art that is absolute production, meaning that it produces ‘being’.

One year ago, at the Venice Biennale, Marx was read; at documenta 14 in Athens, so much engaged political art was shown that the 12 April 2017 issue of Dutch national newspaper NRC Handelsbladlikened it to a ‘stage for the revolution’.  At the same time, however, these revolutionary platforms stay within the confines of biennales and documentas, which reminds one of what Walter Benjamin has called the ‘aestheticization’ of politics, which according to him was also a sign of fascism. Is there a way out of this for art? Can art escape from institutions that maybe do not affirm fascism as such, but certainly neoliberalism, and that turn art into a commodity?

There is always an escape route! Obviously these places must be regarded as battlefields, as places of confrontation and collision, of conflict and rifts. One can always escape that which biennales and documentas represent: that is, one can and should try to escape their control function – these big art institutions of the state or the market do function as control mechanisms – and artists therefore find themselves in exactly the same condition as the workers.

In my view, the problem with art institutions is this: they are arenas, more specifically arenas of a fight for the truth, of critique of ideology and production, places where the discourse of power is exposed, but they are always also marketplaces. The point is to break out of this cage of control by the state and the market and this has always been part of the development of art as it has manifested itself in many different forms, each time in a different manner. For example, at one time we had patrons of the arts who had the same role as the art institutions of today; it was no different then.

And so we have this whole history of constant artistic resistance against these conditions. I don’t think that art has ever been in line with power in any way. The great Italian Renaissance painters and sculptors were not, nor were the painters of the Golden Age in the Lowlands. On the contrary, there have always been breaking points in art that become evident in the artistic production, while these painters and sculptors were nevertheless an integral part of their specific social context. Because of these breaking points one can regard art as a way of unearthing the truth. They qualify art as a mode of truth.

I often talk to friends-comrades who make art and they are becoming increasingly critical of the market. There is a general resistance against the market these days in the actions of those comrades who believe strongest in or empathize with the class struggle – a rejection of the market that is becoming more and more radical. The protest is expressed in this negation, which is quite strong, and it leads to a radical criticism without compromise and without market possibilities.

There is of course also, and quite often, a strong temptation of ‘nothing’, of not doing / making, or of presenting art works that express a not-doing / not-making.

Anyway, I tend to be cautious with regard to these issues, and I think that in every action – and therefore also in art actions – a material composition is required and therefore a composition with reality as well. What I mean is: one should neither look for purity nor demonize the power / force.

In Assembly you emphasize the importance of language and communication. You mention the changing of meaning of words, speaking, and translation, and the appropriation of words as important political action. In this context you posit the idea of entrepreneurship of the multitude. Is this at all possible with a term like ‘entrepreneurship’, which has been associated with capitalism in all its guises for over 200 years? Is there not a risk that critique will wither and distinctions become blurred with such an act of appropriation?

I don’t think so, and frankly I don’t understand why such a polemic arose around specifically this issue as soon as our book was published. We, Michael and I, have always recuperated and reused words, and reversed their meaning in our work. For example, ‘empire’ may be the most academic and traditional term in the history of political science. Not that we were the first to do so: the word ‘capital’ as the title of Marx’s three-part book on the critique of political economy is about as capitalistic as can be. There is nothing wrong in appropriating words that are part of the tradition and ethics of the capitalistic bourgeoisie and assign them a new meaning. On the contrary, this is what we should do. The problem with regard to this form of language practice is to understand the force of reversal.

As to the semantic series of words such as ‘entrepreneurship’, ‘enterprise’, ‘entrepreneur’ in relation to the common – because we never just speak of ‘entrepreneurship’ but about the ‘entrepreneurship of the common’ – the word ‘enterprise’ admittedly is rather ambiguous. Enterprise is something like Christopher Columbus who crossed the Atlantic Ocean and demonstrated a huge capacity for invention. So on the one hand the word refers to a heroic, fantastic project. Columbus engaged in an improbable and completely new undertaking in the space of his time. On the other hand, the term ‘enterprise’ also refers to that with which it is commonly associated, namely a project aimed at financial profit and at generating income.

What we try to do in Assembly is to appropriate words that belong to tradition. We see it as our task to gain words for the common, to recuperate the words. Again, we do not speak of entrepreneurship tout court, but of entrepreneurship of the common. Speaking of the entrepreneurship of the common has the same potential and power as speaking of refusing to work: it leads to a re-appropriation of the common. So the power of this language use lies in this action of re-appropriation and in this the reversal is crucial.

In Assembly you imply that revolution is ontological and not a contingent event – that revolution is not aimed at seizing power, nor that it brings you to power, but that it changes power, or that it can bring you to power but that it changes the nature of power in doing so. You call upon the multitude to seize power in the sense of Machiavelli at the end of The Prince (1532): a call for a new leader who emerges from the multitude, and to not waste the opportunity. What is essential here is the phrase ‘to take power differently’, by which you mean, with Spinoza, that the ‘common’ or ‘freedom, equality, democracy, and wealth’ are guaranteed. ‘Differently’ here does not mean repeating the hypocrisy of freedom (without equality) as a concept of the right, nor that of equality (without freedom) as a proposal by the left. The formulation therefore is inspired by Spinoza to whom the ‘common’ was the basic idea that can also be summarized as: there is no freedom without equality and there is no equality without freedom. Common is an ontological and logical category that assumes and unites an internally contrasting multitude of singularities. Our question is twofold. Why speak of ‘commonism’ instead of simply calling it ‘communism’? And where is solidarity in all this?

Why we don’t call it ‘communism’? Perhaps because that word has been all too much abused in our recent history. In Italy, in the 1970s, there was a group of situationists who called it commontismo(rather a sympathetic lot, these situationists, but it all ended very badly: they turned out to be activist robbers, went to prison or became drug addicts; it all ended tragically).

I have no doubt that one day we will call the political project of the common ‘communism’ again. But it’s up to the people to call it that, not up to us.

Where is solidarity in our discourse? In everything we say there is solidarity because solidarity is in the principles of our discourse. To say it in Aristotelian terms, there is solidarity as in three of the four types of causes: as material cause in the rejection of loneliness, as efficient cause in the collaboration to produce and as final cause in love. In other words, everything that we propose, our entire theoretical building, has its material, efficient and final cause in solidarity. The ‘commontism’ is drenched in solidarity. One cannot live alone, in loneliness, one cannot produce alone, and one cannot love alone.

Our proposals cannot be read in any other way but as proposals of solidarity, or how to escape from loneliness. We have to escape from loneliness in order to define a solidary, close community, as we cannot survive alone in a barren desert. We must escape from loneliness in order to produce, because alone we would never have the means or the time. We must escape from loneliness in order to love, because on your own and without someone else there can be no love. This is the only way to understand this radical transition of / to the common, a transition that we are evolving towards, by the way. There is truly a developing tendency towards solidarity and towards an escape from loneliness.

We live in times of great crisis and terrible emptiness but at the same time these are also times of great expectations. We are facing a void between that which is finished and that which still has to begin. Especially in talking to young people one becomes aware of this terrible loneliness, but also of this great longing. The desert caused by neoliberal capitalism is insufferable in every regard.

Our next question is about that. As in your previous writings, in Assembly you start from the optimistic thought that the Occupy movements demonstrate a rebellion of the multitude, that the ‘possible is a given’, that the ‘common is a given’. But in Assembly you also pose the question, perhaps for the first time, regarding why the revolution of the Occupy movements failed. Does this indicate a turn in your work, a turn away from the earlier optimism? And what does this mean for the idea of revolution?

There is no turn from optimism to pessimism in our work. What we attempted to do is to understand the problem in a realistic manner and to think about possible solutions. The problem as we see it is that of the limits and limitations of movements, both of Occupy and other movements we have seen over the past decade. The most important limitation, in our analysis, is that these movements have not been willing or not been able to translate themselves into institutions and that where they did attempt to do so and in those cases where they actually formed institutions, it all ended in a betrayal of the movement. We see this for example in a part of the Indignados that founded Podemos, who eventually betrayed the situation from which they departed. Having followed all the debates from close up, my opinion of Podemos is negative. They have not succeeded in maintaining the reversal of the relation between strategy and decision or between tactic and strategy, leaving only the tactic.

So it is not about being more or less optimistic, but about grasping the problem in a realistic manner and about thinking of ways to solve the problem and this is what we try to do in our work. We try to see the limits and limitations of the political common-movement. Our conclusion is that power should be seized, but that in and with that operation power should be changed. Therefore, as you quote and as we expressed it in Assembly, it is all about ‘to take the power differently’ and then maintain this radical transition / reversal.

You also deal with populism in Assembly. Shouldn’t we discard the term ‘people’ anyway?

Yes, that’s what the common is all about. The term ‘people’ stays within the logic of Hobbes and the bourgeois line of sovereignty and representation. It is a fiction that violates the multitude and has only that purpose: the multitude should transform itself into one people that dissolves itself in forming the sovereign power. Think of the original frontispiece of Hobbes’ Leviathan, which perfectly illustrates this. But it was Spinoza who, against Hobbes, emphatically used the concept multitudoand underlined that the natural power of the multitude remains in place when a political ordering is formed. Actually, Spinoza, in elaborating these concepts of multitudo and comunis encapsulates the entire issue of politics and democracy, as I have attempted to demonstrate in my book L’anomalia selvaggia and to which we refer again in part in Assembly. Crucial in the transition of singularity to the common, Spinoza teaches us, are imagination, love and subjectivity. Singularity and subjectivity becoming common and translating themselves into newly invented institutions, is one way of summarizing commontism.

With regard to the current digital and communicative capitalism you also dwell on critique and what you call Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s techno-pessimism. You state that in order to arrive at an evaluation of modern technology it is necessary to historicize the arguments of critique. The position of Horkheimer and Adorno only relates to the phase of capitalist development that is controlled by large-scale industry. This constitutes a serious limitation of their critique. My question is: is this restriction of their critique related to the counter image of Enlightenment and modern thinking as forged in the Romantic period by opponents of revolutionary ideas and emancipation and in which their Dialektik der Aufklärung is also caught? Or, to put it differently, is it due to the fact that they do not make an explicit enough distinction between emancipatory modern thinking and capitalism? What is your view on this, also in the light of your thesis on the alternative modernity of Machiavelli-Spinoza-Marx, in which the first two are regarded as the main suspects by Horkheimer and Adorno?

I grew up against the background of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School and it is evident that operaismo is indebted to their critical work, but at the same time the entire development of operaismo can be seen as opposing the conclusions of Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944). Horkheimer and Adorno’s work leads to extremes and extremism, it takes you to the border and then you can’t go any further. It is the conceptualization of a hermetic universe. In operaismo we asked ourselves, departing from this hermetic universe, how one could break it open. Instead of ending where they did, in operaismo we took the hermetic universe as a starting point, that is the universe of capitalism, of the excesses of instrumental rationality, and of the logic of control and repression, and we asked ourselves how we could break open this hermetic universe. We looked for ways to force open this hermetic universe, which had deteriorated into commodity and was heading for catastrophe. Introducing subjectivity is the central element in this, the crowbar.

So we are the children of the Dialectic of Enlightenment, but also rebel against it.

What we rediscovered in operaismo (and also in Assembly) against the positions of Horkheimer and Adorno’s dialectics is ontology, the class struggle and the possibility of subjectivation. Our interest in the pre-1968 Herbert Marcuse can be seen from this perspective, and what has been especially important, according to us, is the work of Hans-Jürgen Krahl. He was a young student of Adorno who was killed in a traffic accident in early 1970, but he wrote a very important work about the formation of the class struggle, Konstitution und Klassenkampf (published posthumously in 1971). His discourse was similar to what we tried to do in Italy. It involves the discovery of the immaterial and intellectual labour that had the potential for political action, for liberation and for breaking with the total exploitation. Georg Lukàcs also played an important part in this discovery, as did Maurice Merleau-Ponty in France. In the intersection between phenomenology and Marxism we find the fabric in which our movement originates.

If you, as an intellectual, thinker, researcher, critical theorist, were to give an assignment to the future generation, what would it be?

What I see as most important, as fundamental in my life, and what I experience as unique in my life and something that connects everything and is positive, is the fact that I have always been a communist militant. Throughout my life I have never done anything, not as a philosopher nor in any of the many other professions or occupations I engaged in, not as a sociologist or sometimes even as professional politician, never have I undertaken anything that wasn’t completely driven by my communist commitment. I have always been a communist militant in everything. That is what I would like to leave to the future. I would like for communist commitment to become the central element again in people’s lives. Because the commonist militant is the salt of the earth.

Pascal Gielen is full Professor of Sociology of Art and Politics at the Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts, University of Antwerp where he leads the Culture Commons Quest Office (CCQO). Gielen is editor-in-chief of the international book series Arts in Society. In 2016, he became laureate of the Odysseus grant for excellent international scientific research of the Fund for Scientific Research Flanders in Belgium. His research focuses on creative labour, the institutional context of the arts and cultural politics. Gielen has published many books  translated in English, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Turkish.

Sonja Lavaert is professor of philosophy at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. She has published on early modern philosophy (Machiavelli, Spinoza), radical contemporary philosophy (Agamben, Negri, Virno), critical theory, Italian studies and philosophy of art. She is the author of Het perspectief van de multitude (2011) and she co-edited The Dutch Legacy. Radical Thinkers of the 17th Century and the Enlightenment (2017) and Aufklärungs-Kritik und Aufklärungs-Mythen. Horkheimer und Adorno in philosophiehistorischer Perspektive (2018). Her research focuses on the philosophical representations of history, and on the genealogy of political and ethical concepts in the interdisciplinary area of philosophy, language, literature, and translation.Credit: This essay is reproduced from the forthcoming book with the kind permission of the authors Pascal Gielen and Sonja Lavaert and publisher Valiz, titled Commonism: A New Aesthetics of the Real, edited by Nico Dockx and Pascal Gielen, for the Antennae-Arts in Society series (Amsterdam: Valiz, September 2018), www.valiz.nl. Text licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivativeWorks 3.0 License.

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Mike Hales: When I first read Gary Werskey’s 2007 ‘three movements’ article – four years ago – I was sceptical. He discussed two British movements of radicals around science, in the 30s-40s and the 70s-80s, and speculated on the possibility of a third (which might possibly have an environmental impetus).

I was particularly unconvinced about the possibility of a Marxist movement, like the other two. But now, in 2018, I do have the sense that, yes, the peer-to-peer commons movement may be the thing that is in fact standing in that place. It would be worthwhile, at least, to proceed on the basis that it is – with substantial (if, for activists, secondary) implications for the field of science and technology studies (STS). I’m in no doubt that P2P-commons is the biggest thing I’ve seen in my activist lifetime . . and that it mobilises the stuff I’ve been cultivating these past 50 years, as a libertarian socialist with an orientation to the politics of knowledges and technologies.

It would be worth proceeding on the basis that P2P-commons is ‘the third radical science movement’

‘Radical science’ in the 70s wasn’t essentially about science?

The movement for P2P-commons may be significantly ‘cultural’ and profoundly ‘materialist’, in ways that might be facilitated and clarified

The P2P-commons movement seems to be carrying forward – expanding – the organic intellectual impetus that began to be apparent in the 70s, ‘in-and-against the PMC’

P2P-commons is way bigger than ‘radical science’ was

Photo by pedrosimoes7

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Republished from JOPP, Issue #10: Peer Production and Work

Arwid Lund: This article examines the relation between peer production and capitalism on a systemic and theoretical level. One problem with understanding peer production as an alternative and potentially competing mode of production in relation to capitalism is that the main bulk of economic theory deals only with capitalism. Alternative economic theories from an emerging theoretical P2P movement have done important pioneer work on commons-based peer production, and in discussing its sustainability as a mode of production both on a systemic and individual level (for the peer producers) within capitalism. This article argues that the disadvantages of the P2P movement’s theoretical framework, compared to a Marxist one, have their roots in an evolutionist motif, and the article aims to situate peer production more clearly in relation to the workings of capital, and in relation to a Marxist understanding of the potential for political agencies and counter-powers to emerge from capital’s outside.

Photo by Mantissa.ca

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The Political Economy of the Common. Ed. by Andrea Fumagalli

(as yet untranslated Italian-language book)

Economia politica del comune, collects a series of essays, mostly published elsewhere, which summarize his analysis of post-crisis contemporary capitalism.

Capitalism has changed. Andrea Fumagalli says so. And he said that, for a long time, his school; the tradition of autonomy, starting from the early writings of Mario Tronti and Raniero Panzieri of the sixties, passing through the intellectually fertile experience of Potere Operaio of the seventies and the brilliant analysis of post-Fordism and the new figure of the social worker ‘of the eighties, always with the analysis firmly anchored in the thought of the now internationally recognized master of the Italian Theory Antonio Negri, has developed a Marxism for the digital age, focused on the Grundrisse, and in particular on the famous’ fragment on the machines ‘, more than on Capital. Together with Christian Marazzi and Maurizio Lazzarato, Andrea Fumagalli is the person who most contributed to this perspective, adding a solid empirical basis based on his experience as a professional economist.

The new book by Andrea, Economia politica del comune, collects a series of essays, mostly published elsewhere, which summarize his analysis of post-crisis contemporary capitalism. For the author, the scenario of the last ten years has been a strengthening of a model of biocapitalism where capitalist exploitation is based no longer on the mere theft of working time in factories or on the appropriation of intellectual production – in the form of technological innovation or intellectual property, central to the analysis of cognitive capitalism – but now on the subsumption – that is, the inclusion and putting to work – of the deepest dimensions of the human condition, such as those related to affections or relationships, particularly when they are articulated through the ubiquitous connectivity of smartphones and social media, and even to life itself as an object of biotechnology.

The man-machine union, visible and potential object of criticism or sabotage in the Fordist factories, has now progressed to become part of the human condition and in this way capable of making life itself – la nuda vita, Agamben would say – in its dimensions pre and post human, in vitro as well as in silico, object of appropriation and capitalist valorization.

In biocapitalism, production is based on putting the commons to work, a concept that is different from that of common goods, even if these are part of it, but which also refers to that life in common – made up of elements such as language, the gestures, the affections, the corporality and the relationships – which now, through digital technologies, is potentially put to work in its most varied manifestations: the freelancer who organizes his temporary cooperation with a team for a specific project, the Airbnb guest who strives to offer a positive stay experience or the teenager who posts a selfie with her favorite brand on Instagram.

Capitalist valorization has also progressed far beyond the Marxian model of the bourgeois drinker of the worker’ sweat. Financial markets play an increasingly central role and, through the financialization of life and productive relations, operate like giant vacuum cleaners that suck up crumbs of surplus value from the global productive and reproductive factory – the credit card, the shipping insurance required in the just-in-time value-chain – to then redistribute them, without transparency or democratic regulation, on financial markets. In this situation in which the socialization of the productive forces, the commons that constitute the true source of value – has now left the greedy pockets of the individual bourgeois to circulate on the financial markets in the form of digitized data – communism is already with us, only that does not belong to us. Biocapitalism represents the realization of the communism of capital, the famous concept taken up by Antonio Negri – and by Marx who, although he never uses it, mentions this possibility in the Grundrisse.

What to do then, comrades? There is no longer a factory to be sabotaged, nor a winter palace to be conquered. But, Andrea suggests, we can re-appropriate the tools in the hands of the capitalist class: finance and money. The currency, – writes Andrea – is now a direct expression of capitalist power, without the intermediation of the state. Andrea proposes the creation of coins and alternative financial instruments, suggesting the use of the seductive technology of the crypto-currencies: blokchain and bitcoin, which are able to establish circuits of valorization external to global finance; it would be desirable for a new currency of the commons suitable to finance a new welfare of the commons, triggering processes of local redistribution of wealth, to then let them grow and acquire more and more powerful autonomy. A strategy similar to that of the autonomy of the eighties, the age of the Hakim Beyi’s TAZ’s, the golden age of the Italian centri sociali of the nineties that, among other things, Andrea recognizes as his main source of inspiration.

The book offers a theoretical sum by one of the main representatives not only of the contemporary Marxist thought but of one of its most fruitful veins. As such it should be seen, in particular the introductory essay “The premise and Twenty thesis on bio-cognitive capitalism”, which sums up the subject with admirable clarity. For me it was a very fruitful reading: Andrea is and always has been, since its brilliant analysis of the new forms of self-employment of the second generation in 1994, a Master.

At the same time I think that the book a little exaggerate the grip and power of bio-capitalism. The result is a totalitarian image, where every human activity is immediately subsumed and exploited, from pedaling for Deliveroo to being on Facebook, and, using the same logic – why not -, playing soccer is actually a way to help reproduce the basics of the football market that exploits the fans as well as the television audience. What to me it sounds “weird”, however, it is the astonishing ineffectiveness of contemporary capitalism in exploiting the common which has partly generated. Facebook, Airbnb and Amazon earnings all in all modest, Uber and Deliveroo are at a loss, start-up incubators around the world are abandoning the cash for equity model, finding that they do not make a lot of money by incubating start-ups. Above all, there is a lack of innovation and ideas: large multinational companies have liquid reserves of unprecedented historical size – Apple announces a stock buy back of $ 100 billion – and no one seems able to find profitable use of big data or algorithms that go beyond the completion of the advertising targeting or the advice of other songs you may like on Spotify.

Capitalism like that will definitely not be able to survive the radical challenges that await us as we begin to cross the Anthropocene. To paraphrase another great master of Italian postwar Marxism, Giovanni Arrighi, the problem is not that the cognitive biocapitalism exploits our life, but that it isn’t able to do it well enough. I say this because as long as there is exploitation at least there is a rationality to criticize or sabotage. Instead contemporary biocapitalism looks increasingly like a rotting body that no one has the power to take away, as the German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck claims. In this context, the alternative currency will certainly contribute to creating alternative valorisation circuits. My intuition is that the protagonists of this process are not so much those of Macao or Teatro Valle, but rather the entrepreneurs of that pirate modernity that now connects the small Chinese factories with the needs of the popular classes of Lagos or Tangier, passing through Piazza Garibaldi of Naples.

Photo by Lanpernas .

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In this article, Shukaitis surveys “the particular role outer space and extraterrestrial voyage play within the radical imagination.” In particular, he sees , and a way to construct utopian worlds that give meaning to our struggles for justice in this world here and now. In autonomist Marxist terms, it presents fictional scenarios of what autonomists call “recomposition” — rebuilding, under our own hegemony, the social spaces and institutions that have been destroyed and atomized by capitalism — in an outer space setting. It was “a forward projection of an outside to capitalism enabling a space of possibility in the present.”

Leftist social criticism has displayed an ambivalent set of attitudes towards outer space — attitudes that mirror the dichotomy between the techno-utopian and primitivist or technophobic strands of the Left. Although many see outer space (whether in fictional scenarios or real agenda) as an arena for building post-capitalism and lifting the earth itself out of its current state, some quarters see it as a frivolous diversion of resources from fixing poverty and inequality here on earth.

Perhaps an interesting question… is not so much a question of whether there is a presence of outer space imagery and extraterrestrial travel residing within the workings of the social imaginary, but of their function. Their presence is felt both when the poet and songwriter Gil Scott-Heron complains that he can’t pay his doctor bills or rent and wonders what could be done with all the resources that would be available if they weren’t being spent on getting ‘Whitey on the Moon’ (1971), and when Stevie Wonder contrasts the utopian conditions of ‘Saturn’ (1976), which are peaceful and free from capitalist exchange, with conditions and problems of the urban ghettos.

Outer space is a favorite setting for radical treatment, Shukaitis argues, because “the unknown and the mysterious are almost by definition of particular fascination to those crafting mythopoetic narratives and imagery.”

This has long been true of imaginary settings other than outer space, I would note, going back to ancient festivals (recounted by James Scott in Domination and the Arts of Resistance) in which the world was turned upside-down for a day and the social order inverted, medieval peasant utopias like Cockaigne, the 20th century hobo utopia of Big Rock Candy Mountain, and Jimi Hendrix’s vision of an Atlantean escape from the ugliness of war and capitalism in the “1983” suite.

The ruling classes have been aware of the subversive potential of such speculation, Shukaitis writes, as demonstrated by the post-WWII wave of repression against utopian collectivism in fiction and the corresponding popularity of anti-collectivist themes in works like 1984 and Invasion of the Body Snatchers that treat any alternative to “our free enterprise system” and the American model of individualism as a totalitarian dystopia. And as the latter example indicates, themes of alien invasion have been used to play up xenophobia against other nations of our own species.

This does not mean, of course, that technological utopianism as such has not been used in the dominant narrative. As Shukaitis points out, American-style “rugged individualism” and the export of the “pioneer spirit” to the frontiers of space were recurring theme in Golden Age science fiction.

At the same time, libertarian socialist techno-utopian themes were seen as a threat not just to corporate capitalism as a system of power, but to authoritarian state communism. Although “early efforts towards cybernetic communism were initially developed within the Soviet Union,” they were ultimately repressed because the party “feared, rightly, that they could not control it.” (Actually, if I recall correctly, it was the Soviet military leadership that vetoed conversion of the military’s computer network into the backbone of a civilian Internet as was done with Arpanet in the United States.)

Shukaitis can’t let the theme of radically utopian treatments of outer space pass without mentioning one of the most bizarre examples, that of the dissident Trotskyite Juan Posadas, who not only hoped advanced aliens would export communism to the earth, but looked forward to a devastating nuclear war as the trigger for revolution and post-capitalist transformation.

Getting back to our earlier dichotomy between positive and negative views of technology on the Left, anarcho-primitivism “does not find much considered redeemable” in the space travel genre, any more than it does in technology in general. This determinist view of technological development, Shukaitis says, is a form of mystification that reflects their unfamiliarity with it, and ignores the radically divergent alternatives presented by technology depending on the nature of the structural power framework into which it is integrated.

In language that echoes David Graeber, Shukaitis notes that the actual development of technology under late capitalism has been a considerable disappointment, compared to the utopian predictions in popular fiction. Technological development has been disproportionately diverted into servicing institutional needs like the Military-Industrial Complex, waste consumption to overcome the crisis of overaccumulation and idle production capacity, and the control and distribution infrastructures required by corporate globalization, and not to reducing hours of labor or making daily life more fulfilling.

This leaves us with the necessity of contesting state and capitalist control of the process of technological development, and harnessing it to our own liberatory ends. And speculative fiction, Shukaitis argues, functions as a sort of cognitive map for this purpose: “an imaginal landscape is a precondition for actually finding a northwest passage in the physical world.” In this regard, the fictional setting of outer space is more symbolic than literal, implying not so much “a conception of exodus in physical terms” as “one in terms of intensive coordinates.”

In other words a shift towards an exodus that does not leave while attempting to subtract itself from forms of state domination and capitalist valorization.

Shukaitis mentions hippie dropout communities and Italian autonomist social centers as examples of such exodus within the physical surroundings of capitalist society.

Similar themes of exodus were developed in Afrofuturist science fiction, “which as a literary and cultural movement is based on exploring the black experience through the relation between technology, science fiction and racialization.” In particular he mentions the fascinating decades-long trajectory of the Sun Ra Arkestra (including the 1974 film Space is the Place), which fused themes of libertarian alien societies, Afrocentric history and advanced technology, and related them to issues of racial oppression in the United States.

In recent decades space has become a setting for explicit Leftist development of radically utopian and anti-capitalist visions. Shukaitis quotes Eduardo Rothe, who put it as plainly (and messianically) as anyone could want in a Situationist journal in 1969. Rothe directly addresses the seizure of science from capitalism and the state by the people, and its recuperation for their own utopian goals.

Humanity will enter into space to make the universe the playground of the last revolt: that which will go against the limitations imposed by nature. Once the walls have been smashed that now separate people from science, the conquest of space will no longer be an economic or military ‘promotional’ gimmick, but the blossoming of human freedoms and fulfillments, attained by a race of gods. We will not enter into space as employees of an astronautic administration or as ‘volunteers’ of a state project, but as masters without slaves reviewing their domains: the entire universe pillaged for the workers’ councils.

(Leaving aside, obviously, the question of whether there are other people on the worlds out there who aren’t quite ready to be “pillaged.”)

As the example of Rothe suggests, the use of outer space by radical Leftists is not always utopian or fictional. There are efforts here and now to take back space exploration from government agencies and capitalist corporations, and bring it within the domain of free, cooperative, and self-organized human endeavor. Shukaitis mentions the formation of the Association of Autonomist Astronauts in 1995, in protest against the Pentagon’s militarization of space. Although they initially emerged from the radical artistic scene, they formulated (admittedly for the most part as a spur to the imagination) a five-year plan to “establish a planetary network to end the monopoly of corporations, governments and the military over travel in space.”

A more pragmatic, nuts-and-bolts vision along similar lines was presented in the fictional short story “Open Shot” in Analog science fiction magazine, about the Stallman, an open-source hardware group’s victorious entry in a private moonshot competition in a field otherwise dominated by capitalist corporations.

Although Shukaitis’s 2009 article predates most of these developments, the continuing development of cheap micro-manufacturing tools and open hardware communities since then has led to a proliferation of real-world open hardware space projects. Elon Musk’s space ventures have, at the same time, been the source of misguided but understandable hopes along the same lines. In an earlier commentary (“One Cheer for SpaceX”), I surveyed some of the current FOSS space projects and noted that even though Musk’s own corporate vision is toxic, he is nevertheless pushing space technology in cheaper, more modular, and ephemeral directions that can be pirated and otherwise recuperated by commons-based peer production for the eventual post-capitalist expansion into space.

I’m disappointed that Shukaitis didn’t give Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy the attention it deserved, as a fictional scenario of a viable libertarian socialist society being developed on another planet, and providing a demonstration effect for the oppressed peoples of earth that was a real and present danger to the power structure.

In contrast to Robinson’s relatively optimistic visions in the Mars Trilogy and 2312, the television series The Expanse presents a dystopian vision of a solar system under the hegemony of exploitative capitalist corporations.

My own guess is that the truth is a lot closer to Robinson’s vision than to that of the TV show, and capitalist and state technologies of control are simply not equal to the requirements of maintaining hegemony over people living and working off-planet. Once the first mining colonies and space habitats are set up in the asteroid belt, or the first colonies on the moon and Mars, I suspect earth’s government agencies and corporations will quickly discover that whatever contractual arrangements they’ve made with the inhabitants of space — and whatever absentee titles they have to the land and resources those people are working — aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. In that case the future of space will be post-capitalist regardless of what happens here on earth, and may well provide leverage for the transition here at home.

Photo by SerenityRose

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Aaron Vansintjan: At some point during the Quebec student strike of 2012, I found myself in an enormous protest in downtown Montreal. We took up the street as far as the eye could see. All of a sudden, a mass of people dressed in black stormed down the other half of the road. The anarchist contingent, going the wrong way.

The effect was incredible: here we were, in the thousands, all walking together in one direction to demand tuition subsidized by the state, and simultaneously, thousands of others were calling for an end to the state, walking the other way. I climbed onto the concrete divider in the center of the street separating the two lanes, unsure of which side I should join.

One protest, two directions: a neat metaphor for the tension in the Left today. We are trying to choose between supporting welfare programs and rejecting the top-down nature of the state itself. Just as education, health insurance, and welfare need to be protected, the state plays a key role in environmental destruction, securitization and policing, and international wars. How can we resolve this tension?

If you try to figure out what role the state should have, you’ll inevitably be led to a list of great thinkers: Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek, and, for a more contemporary twist, Thomas Piketty or Amartya Sen.

Rarely does Elinor Ostrom appear on that list—but she certainly deserves to be included. Ostrom spent much of her life trying to figure out how people solve problems of distribution amongst themselves, and why some communities are able to share resources while others are not. Her work sought to think political economy beyond both the state and the market—something that many of those giants of political theory had not, thus far, been able to do very well. In other words, she could think in two directions, at the same time.

I’ve always thought that, for people interested in social progress, engaging with Ostrom’s work is crucial. Unfortunately, she’s not very well known. It’s not that Elinor Ostrom’s work is hard to get hold of; her relative obscurity is probably more related to the fact that it’s not that easy to figure out the wider implications of her research. Her work can help us think about austerity, state welfare, the market, local democracy, and environmental issues. But how it would do so is rarely made explicit.

Luckily, this gap has now been rectified in the new book, Elinor Ostrom’s rules for radicals: Cooperative alternatives beyond markets and states, by Derek Wall and published by Pluto Press. Wall is a politician (as a Green Party candidate he stood against Theresa May in the 2017 General Elections) and activist who spends much of his time writing about radical politics, social movements, political theory, and left strategy.

As its title suggests, the book is directed at people on the left (‘radicals’). Wall describes this book as a bite-size take on his more serious and dry PhD-thesis-length tome, The Sustainable economics of Elinor Ostrom: Commons, contestation, and craft. There is little dryness here, though, as Wall peppers the book with little detours and passionate reflections on subjects as diverse as Occupy Wall Street, Rojava, and the TV show The Wire.

Throughout the book the main sense I got was a wholehearted excitement about and admiration for Elinor Ostrom’s work. Apart from its very necessary contribution to leftist strategy and thought, it is this enthusiasm that propels the book forward, making it an enjoyable and light read.

With a nod to Saul Alinsky, Wall starts the book with 13 very short ‘rules for radicals’, which include ‘be specific’, ‘collective ownership can work’, ‘map power’, and ‘no panaceas’. These may not make much sense at first, but as you read the book, they form the basic threads of his argument and help to create a coherent picture of Ostrom’s work and how it can inform the left.

I was able to attend the book launch in London this past November, and we had agreed that I could ask some questions after. During the talk, Wall—wearing a Kurdish scarf and expressing solidarity with his friend Mehmet Aksoy who has recently passed away—talked more about the stories he knew about Ostrom than the contents of his book itself. He referred to her as ‘Elinor’, as if talking about a dear friend, and the audience laughed along as he told us about her meeting with the political economist Garrett Hardin, and Wall’s own encounter with her shortly before she passed away.

Later, over drinks at the pub across the street, we huddled together to talk about Rojava, Marxism, ecosocialism, and today’s new social movements—not at all in the right state for a serious interview. So we decided to leave it to an email later. The following is the result of our email exchange, edited lightly for brevity and flow.

Aaron Vansintjan: Say I’m a socialist unfamiliar with Ostrom’s work. What’s your 1-minute pitch? Why should I care?

Derek Wall: Socialism, someone said, is about sharing.  Marxists argue that means of production need to be owned by the whole community.  Elinor gives us the tools to do the job, a hard-nosed, flexible approach to communal ownership based on science, research, and pragmatism.  Her insight that collective ownership is possible makes the apparently radical reasonable.

What kind of person was Elinor Ostrom? How do you think that shows in her work?

She was a fun open human being, she would talk to anybody, and was known to take care to answer questions that came in emails from across the planet. She was interested in practical problem solving and opposed any kind of dogma.  She was not that kind of elitist ivory tower academic but respected others and sought to learn from the grassroots.

In the beginning of the book you have a list of 13 rules for radicals. One of them is ‘pose social change as problem solving’? What do you mean by this?

In politics we tend to think in terms of conspiracies and slogans.  Politics is too often seen as replacing an elite with an alternative set of leaders. This is at best insufficient. I am not fundamentally against electoral politics in a liberal context but they are limited.  The Ostrom approach is about participation, creating a deeply democratic society instead of replacing ‘bad people’ with ‘good people’ at the top of a structure.

In turn, we too often have a kind of magical and ideological thinking where we are for ‘good things’ and against ‘bad things’, promoting broad slogans or writing manifestos with sets of demands.  Instead we need to view the good things we would like to achieve such as ecology, equality, and freedom as challenges to meet.  The history of the left shows that whether we are talking about reform or revolution, practical problems and entrenched power structures can transform good intentions into restoration of oppression.

Specifically, Elinor Ostrom looked at ‘commons’ as a matter of problem solving.  She didn’t believe that commons were either doomed to failure (the so-called tragedy of the commons) or a universal solution. Instead she noted that some things were inevitably held in common—for example, its difficult for an individual to own a river or the seas—and then looked at how to solve the problem of overuse.  I think this is a good approach!

What do you think explains the paucity of awareness about Elinor Ostrom’s work?

Ostrom’s approach is difficult to place, she was often inspired by thinkers on the free market right like James Buchanan and Hayek but in doing so challenged market based notions of purely private property and the market.  Her uncanny ability to upset those who seek to summarise her ideas as simple slogans means her ideas can be challenging.  However interest in the left is growing, for example, the Indigenous leader and revolutionary Hugo Blanco cites her and her approach seems to describe much of what the Kurds and their allies are trying to achieve in Rojava.

How do you think Ostrom’s work relates to Marxism?

For a start, Marxism has stressed class struggle and macro change. Marxists have argued that revolution will transform society and provide a break from old oppressive structures with the introduction of communism.  Ostrom’s micro analysis about how you build practical institutional structures to promote more ecological, equal and diverse societies, can be rejected as irrelevant by the left.  Constructing these structures is a waste of time in capitalism because Marxists might argue capitalist systems will destroy them.  Indeed it is good to be critical of Ostrom from this perspective because she didn’t focus on the real tragedy of the commons, the fact that commons were enclosed and commoners expelled by the rich and powerful. However if you don’t think about the nuts and bolts of governance in a post capitalist society, revolution, in my opinion, will fail to produce institutions that genuinely promote liberation.

When we talked the other night you mentioned that the left often thinks in terms of revolution, but has little plan of how to set up resource management and governance systems afterwards. Could you explain what you mean by this? How do you think Ostrom’s work can be helpful in that regard?

Getting there by destroying repressive power structures is the task of revolutionaries and remains essential.  However revolutions can only be the start. Any post-revolutionary society is in danger of reproducing the previous ways of doing things. Therefore thinking carefully about institutional decisions to make sure that post-revolutionary structures work to promote participation and genuine democratic control is essential but too often forgotten.  Ostrom was fascinated by the practice of participation and looked in some detail at how to build alternative structures, in doing so she provides both radical inspiration and practical suggestions.  You can see how the best of the Latin American lefts thinkers, for example, Marta Harnecker, both advocate commons and a more nuanced understanding of institutional factors if we are to transform society in a direction which is sustainable (in both ecological and social terms).

You mention the Kurdish struggle in Rojava. How do you think Ostrom’s work can help us understand the situation there? Have you had any conversations with Kurdish activists about her work?

Yes many times. The Kurds and their allies in Rojava are putting forward the ideas of Ocalan and Bookchin, based on ecology, feminism, diversity, and self-management. Ostrom’s work fits with this and I often talked to Kurdish activists about her work. Sadly my friend Mehmet Aksoy was killed by ISIS in Raqqa in September, Mehmet was a journalist and filmmaker from North London.  His loss is huge to all who knew him.  He commissioned me to write an article about Elinor Ostrom and Rojava, you can find it here.

You seem excited about the new book you’re writing, a biography of the Indigenous leader, Hugo Blanco. Could you tell me a bit about it?

Hugo is perhaps the most important ecosocialist leader on the planet.  In 1962 he led an uprising for Indigenous land rights, when he was a member of the Fourth International in Peru. This was successful and brought land reform but he was imprisoned until 1970. Aged 83, he is still an active militant and publishes the newspaper Lucha Indigena (Indigenous struggle). I am in the happy position of getting emails from him nearly every day. Elinor Ostrom was about cooperation rather than political militancy and revolution, and yet they are very similar individuals—committed to ecological matters and friends to Indigenous people.  He has lived through prison, exile, being a Senator, and is still very busy. In recent years he has been supporting communities opposing destructive mining projects in the North of Peru. The Zapatistas in Mexico have been a big influence on his thinking, which has shifted from more traditional Leninism to a more horizontal and anarchist approach. He is a very inspiring person and astute political thinker, so I want to spread both his words and wisdom and Elinor’s.

This is a question for the New Year. You’re a Marxist, a Green Party candidate, you ascribe to Zen Buddhism, and your work now is focusing on Hugo Blanco, Elinor Ostrom, and Louis Althusser. What are some common questions, concerns, ideas, or passions that will drive you in the next year?

Its sounds quite disparate when you put it like that.  My key focus is how to challenge the ecological crisis that threatens both humanity and other species.  This is a crisis of economic growth, we can’t produce, consume, and waste at increasing levels without challenging basic biological cycles on planet Earth.  So Marx’s analysis of Capitalism remains to me vital to understanding the cause of ecological crisis in terms of an entire social and economic system based on growth. Marx once noted, ‘Accumulate, accumulate is Moses and the Prophets’— the secular religion of capitalism puts economic expansion and profit at the centre of everything. Louis Althusser, a highly controversial figure, remains to my mind the most sophisticated reader of Marx. So, yes, I have a passion for thinking about green politics and acting to further green politics but I am keen to be flexible in what I do. While from Trump and climate change the outlook seems bleak, there is an upsurge of enthusiasm for radical politics, so in the coming year I hope to support and empower the emergence of political alternatives. I am not a believer in one political organisation being ‘correct’ to the exclusion of all others, so amongst other things I am excited, on the one hand, by efforts to green Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party and on the other within the Green Party work of a new generation of activists, for example, Aimee Challenor in promoting LGBTIQ politics.

Politics is endless struggle. Both Elinor Ostrom and Hugo Blanco have made me rethink how I do politics, making it more radical and practical, so spreading the word about their work will continue to be significant to me. And, yes, once I have finished writing the Hugo Blanco book, I will start writing Althusser for Revolutionaries.

Aaron Vansintjan is a PhD student researching food and cities, and a co-editor of Uneven Earth. He recently edited the book by Giorgos Kallis, In defense of degrowth, which is now available in print.

Elinor Ostrom’s rules for radicals: Cooperative alternatives beyond markets and states by Derek Wall is available from Pluto Press. 

Photo by NevilleNel

The post Why the left needs Elinor Ostrom appeared first on P2P Foundation.

I’ve known Derek Wall for some time as a friend on Twitter, a fellow admirer of Elinor Ostrom, an Ostrom scholar, and an official in the Green Party of England and Wales. This is not my first introduction to him as a scholar; I read his The Sustainable Economics of Elinor Ostrom (2014), which he was kind enough to share with me in proof.

As is customary (and unfortunately necessary) in any general treatment of Ostrom, Wall begins his introductory chapter by citing Garrett Hardin’s 1968 essay “The Tragedy of the Commons” as a jumping off point. I say it’s unfortunately necessary because Hardin’s ahistorical nonsense has gotten around the world many times while Ostrom’s truth about the governance of actual, historical commons was just getting its boots on. Never mind that Hardin himself later admitted that he knew little to nothing about the actual history of commons governance, and conceded that the title was unfortunate. He is still a perennial “authority” for neoliberal ideologues and right-libertarians (many of whom apparently know nothing of the commons beyond Hardin’s reference to them) who wish to “prove” that efficient commons governance is impossible.

Elinor Ostrom’s most famous work, Governing the Commons, was a broad survey of case studies of commons governance in history — including some commons which persist under their old governance rules to this day — and a set of eight principles of successful commons governance which she inferred from that history.

Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel for ‘demonstrating how local property can be successfully managed by local commons without any regulation by central authorities or privatization’ (Nobel.org 2009). She argued that commons, including common land, forests or fisheries that were owned collectively, could be conserved. This was radical stuff; other economists argued, along with Garrett Hardin, that collective ownership would always fail because of the ‘tragedy of the commons’ which led to over use and disaster….

According to Ostrom indigenous people and others have often maintained commons for hundreds or even thousands of years without destroying these environments. Ostrom argued that democratic control, rather than top-down management or simple privatisation, works to conserve nature.

After a brief biographical sketch — including a childhood where she picked up a frugal DIY ethos, and the possible influence of her husband Vincent on her interest in the commons — Wall goes on to finish up the introductory chapter with an argument for the general importance of Ostrom’s work.

Although Ostrom did not regard herself as being on the Left, as Wall concedes, and could at least plausibly be accused of ignoring class conflict, her work is nevertheless of value to those of us on the Left who do use a class analysis. First, the commons — with the rules for successful governance she distilled from her historical studies — are an invaluable addition to the organizational toolkit for a postcapitalist society. Regardless of whether Ostrom herself paid adequate attention to the historic nature of the state as an instrument of class power, and in suppressing and enclosing the commons, those of us who are interested in resurrecting the commons as an organizing logic (e.g. the commons-based peer production model promoted by the P2P Foundation, the commons-based local economies promoted by the new municipalist movements, etc.) owe it to ourselves to take her seriously. And second, regardless of her arguable lack of historical class analysis, her findings are themselves a valuable weapon of class struggle.

She developed a body of research that can be used to defend the commons and commoners. Theory, including Ostrom’s, can have a material effect. For hundreds of years, perhaps thousands, collectively-owned resources have been stolen from communities with the simple justification that the commons was inevitably ‘tragic’. Left to collective ownership, it is often claimed, individuals would abuse the system and wreck the commons. Either privatisation or strong state control was needed to prevent catastrophe…. [Ostrom] found that commons could be made to work and were not automatically doomed because of an intrinsic flaw in human nature. Her careful research is a powerful weapon of self-defence for those who wish to protect a commons under threat.

“Equally radical and useful,” Wall continues, is Ostrom’s broader argument for political and economic organizational models “beyond the market and the state.” She demolishes, obviously, the neoliberal conception of corporate “privatization” as the only alternative to state ownership. But her work is more important still for the Left. In practice, the main currents of 20th century socialism adopted either some mix of market and state as their primary organizational model — the “market socialism” of Lange and Tito, or central planning that can only be distinguished from state control with heavy-duty squinting. With the commons, Ostrom offers the Left — and in particular Marxists — a way to recover Marx’s vision of a future society that is genuinely both post-capitalist and post-state.

Although Ostrom did not regard herself as a Leftist, and the main influences on her work were fairly mainstream (e.g. institutional economics, public choice theory and game theory), she developed those influences in directions that were, intentionally or not, quite congenial to certain currents of the Left. Her approach to research, in itself, reflected considerable elements of what would later be called a P2P ethos; her work “was based on what she termed co-production,” acting as “part of a larger network,” with knowledge and theory “constructed with the active participation of the community.”

And her idea of democracy, which she saw as the key to commons management and the solution of many other problems, was far from the conventional notions being peddled in academia at that time.

[B]y democracy she meant not just traditional liberal democracy but popular involvement through direct participation, not top-down institutions. She and her husband Vincent spent a lifetime arguing that the more that people were involved in constructing the rules of governance, the better the rules would work…. She thought the exact form that such direct democracy might take was likely to differ from place to place.

In this regard she resembles thinkers from Kropotkin to Graeber, who see “democracy” not as some crowning achievement of dead white males in a handful of privileged times and places, but something that people have naturally been doing in face-to-face groups everywhere since the beginning of humanity, in settings from folkmotes to pirate utopias, when their efforts were not suppressed — often by formally “democratic” states.

But in the end, Wall dismisses the question of whether Ostrom was “really” on the Left as irrelevant compared to that of what uses her work can be put to by the Left.

I am not ultimately making any claim in this book that Elinor Ostrom was on the left, nor even trying with much precision to pigeonhole Ostrom politically…. [M]y main aim is to make her work accessible and to show how those on the left, especially the ecosocialist left, can make productive use of her diverse and provocative thinking…. The extent to which she was radical can be judged by the effects of her work…. Thus, this book, chapter by chapter, examines her work and shows how it can be of practical use.

(NOTE: Anyone who enjoys this book but would like some more detailed background on Ostrom’s early life and the specific formative influences on her work can find plenty of both in Wall’s earlier book The Sustainable Economics of Elinor Ostrom.)

Chapters Two through Four are an examination, at increasing levels of generality, of the lessons of Ostrom’s studies on the commons: on the subject matter of Governing the Commons itself in Chapter Two, on the broader lessons of her research on the commons for ecological issues in general in Chapter Three, and the implications of an organizational model “beyond market and state” for society as a whole.

Chapter Two begins with the original context of Ostrom’s research into the commons: Hardin’s unfortunate article (doubly unfortunate in its influence) on the subject, and summarizes the results (including the eight rules for effective governance she distilled from her historical investigations).

Hardin’s presumption comes across as even more egregious in Ostrom’s account of the lecture she attended: not only did he feel justified in saying, based entirely on an a priori analysis of his totally imaginary and ashistorical model of the “commons,” that they were doomed absent massive state intervention, but he went so far as to proclaim that the only solution was mandating universal sterilization after the first child.

Hardin saw the overconsumption of resources as the inevitable result of overpopulation and human incapacity for self-restraint. I would note the irony of this, considering that: 1) the actual overgrazing of the commons in England was the work of landed interests — the same people pushing for enclosure in the interest of “efficiency” — using their political influence to ignore the rules by which villagers had up until then governed their commons quite effectively and sustainably; 2) overconsumption of resources is the result, not of a do-nothing state, but of the state actively promoting the consumption of subsidized resource inputs by capitalist industry through the enclosure of land and resource commons and giving big business preferential access to them. The real villain, in the destruction of natural resources, is not ordinary villagers overgrazing their sheep in the want of proper government or corporate oversight; it is Nestle draining aquifers free of charge and California factory farms wasting subsidized irrigation water, with the active help and encouragement of the state.

It’s also worth noting that Hardin’s right-libertarian fans have no coherent criterion for distinguishing the “private” property they favor from the “collective” property they oppose, and no basis for explaining how the capitalist corporation qualifies as “private property” but the natural resource commons does not. The corporation is every bit as much an example of collective ownership as the commons. It is legally not the property of the shareholders, either collectively or severally, but of a corporate person; the “property” rights of the shareholders consist mostly in participating in the election of the Board of Directors (in most cases a self-perpetuating oligarchy of inside directors selected by cooptation, in actual practice), and to whatever dividends management sees fit to issue.

If anything it’s the corporation that’s subject to a real tragedy of the commons because its de facto property rights are vested in a managerial oligarchy whose material interests are diametrically opposed to those of the people who are in direct contact with the day-to-day situation, experience the effects of the policies made by management, and whose situational knowledge, social capital and effort are the actual source of value. On the other hand it is in the interest of management to strip the organization of human capital and gut its long-term productive capacities for the sake of boosting quarterly earnings (and with them their own bonuses and stock holdings).

Although Ostrom was not an anarchist and not opposed in principle (or even practice) to either the state or the large corporation, her findings in Governing the Commons were nearly the opposite of Hardin’s assumptions. If Hardin believed humans were incapable of self-governance and could be saved from themselves only by the intervention of higher authority, Ostrom had faith in the ability of people in face-to-face groups to work out solutions to the problems they faced if they were not prevented from doing so by interference from above. Some five or six of her eight principles of governance, based on her observation of successful commons, involve either vesting ownership and decision-making authority in those who use the resources, directly experience the effects of the governance rules, and are in day-to-day contact with the situation, or preventing interference from above by authoritarian institutions beyond the control of users.

The design rule that commons should be “nested” or federated within larger systems — particularly at the bioregional level — is also the main principle of her views on environmental policy (Chapter Three). It strikes me that in Ostrom’s vision of a polycentric system of governance with the commons as its core logic, the state plays a role similar to that of Cosma Orsi’s “Partner State,” as developed by Michel Bauwens:  i.e. a platform which enables or facilitates the work of the commons, and maintains a congenial environment for their operation. In this she is in the very broad tradition going back to Saint-Simon, developed by Proudhon and Marx among others, that envisons “governance of persons” being replaced by “the administration of things.”

In her work on the commons, Ostrom showed that humans were capable of cooperative behavior mediated neither by the cash nexus nor by state administration. The larger application of this principle to society as a whole is the subject of Chapter Four. Ostrom was no one-trick pony. “Beyond Markets and States” does not mean simply the commons as a “third alternative,” but a whole ecosystem of cooperative and democratic options. She saw modern institutions like the corporation as commons prone to dysfunctions from incentive problems, and saw the stakeholder cooperative as a way to align the incentives of those in direct contact with the situation and who created the value with the success of the corporation. She also endorsed Grassroots Economic Organizing (GEO) and supported the broader vision of a Solidarity Economy.

The knowledge and incentive principles that emerged from Ostrom’s study of the commons, and led her to support other Solidarity Economy institutions like the cooperative, also informed her general understanding of democracy — the subject of Chapter Five,”Deep Democracy.” All decision-making, she believed, is apt to be improved by involving those directly affected by it. And this vision of deep democracy is extremely relevant to libertarian strands of socialism. Although Ostrom shied away from the “socialist” label and tended to identify it with top-down state control, Wall notes, her concrete principles are quite compatible with socialist models like that of the autonomists Negri and Hardt. He also draws parellels between her thought and Bookchin’s confederalism (as well as Kurdish attempts to put this into practice in Rojava).

Given this preoccupation with empowering those affected by decisions, it only makes sense that Ostrom would have a broader interest in amplifying the voices of the unheard and powerless. This is the subject of the chapter on “Feminism and Intersectionality.” She was also heavily influenced by her own experience of discrimination, as a woman (about which you can read in more detail in the biographical material in Chapter One); for example, she was denied the opportunity to major in economics because she lacked adequate background in higher mathematics, but also was prevented from enrolling in a course of mathematical studies because faculty felt such studies would be wasted on a woman who would just get married anyway.

The chapter on “Trust and Cooperation” starts with the significant influence of game theory on Ostrom’s institutional analysis. As with most issues, Ostrom shied away from adopting general positions on “human nature,” whether they made cooperation or competition the more essential human characteristic. Rather, she focused on institutional designs and procedural rulesets to optimize for cooperative behavior.

Interestingly, the Prisoner’s Dilemma game — which influences many thinkers who are pessimistic about the potential for human cooperation — starts with the assumption that the subjects are isolated from direct communication with each other, and have all their contact with the world outside their cell filtered through authority figures. Ostrom’s approach to commons design and governance, on the other hand, assumes free and ongoing communication between those seeking to deal with their shared circumstances in an optimal manner. In other words, isolation and atomization tends to increase authoritarianism and betrayal, while communication produces the optimal result. Perhaps this is why authoritarians who promote the ugliest and most authoritarian pictures of “human nature” also have the biggest vested interest in turning groups of people against each other, and isolating them in the face of their rulers. People who are worried about nonsense like the threat to “traditional marriage,” or “illegal aliens,” or trans women in public restrooms, or “Sharia Law,” are a lot less likely to notice their areas of commonality and work together to promote their common interest against the billionaires who are actually screwing them over.

Ostrom found that, conversely, ongoing relationships with high levels of communication tend to build trust.

She found… that research suggested that cheap talk was useful. By cheap talk, she meant that if commoners or others were able to communicate directly with each other, trust was more likely to occur than if they did not meet and exchange views.

Given everything we’ve seen about Ostrom’s views so far, it would be reasonable to expect strong sympathies for a peer-to-peer approach to science. And as it turns out, that’s right on the mark (Chapter Eight, “Science for the People”). Science, she believed, was prone to dominance by elites whose paradigms became generational dogmas. She sought to empower dissidents and outsiders to challenge these dogmas. Ostrom’s approach to research, Wall writes, was similar to Paolo Freire’s: a co-learning process in which the community was involved, not a “Knowledge Bank.” It’s reflected in her approach to investigating the commons.

Her approach to this was to suggest that the people who participate in a commons are just as likely, probably more so to have good ideas about solving this problem than outside experts. Garrett Hardin argued that the commoners would fail to maintain the commons and an outside power would need to be brought in. The outside power would be equipped with expertise that the commoners lack.

She took a similarly Freirean attitude toward education as such, arguing that democracy, commons management, and other forms of self-governance would likely fail if public school pedagogy was passive rather than participatory.

Finally, she took the position that knowledge itself was a commons and put her P2P approach to research into practice in her workshops at Bloomington.

In her analysis of institutions (Chapter Nine, “Transforming Institutions”), Ostrom’s focus was on what people actually do, not on paper rules and tables of organization. Her mapping of institutions included actual power relationships within institutions, how powerful members could use formal rules and procedures to pursue their own interest, and how technical “legality” could serve as a cover for robbery.

At the same time, the form taken by institutional rules can affect the balance of power between different interests, and rules can be rewritten to make institutions more democratic and egalitarian. For example, the rules of corporate governance can be rewritten to empower internal and external stakeholders whose interests are currently ignored by self-aggrandizing management. But because of the law of unintended consequences, there must be a tentative and ad hoc nature to institutional design and rulemaking, and a willingness to frequently reassess policies in the face of ongoing experience. And obviously, based on previously examined considerations in Ostrom’s design philosophy, the best way to promote successful adaptation to circumstances is by empowering those directly involved to assess and respond to feedback from previous decisions.

The final chapter (“Conflict and Contestation”) is Wall’s overall assessment of Ostrom’s value for lessons. The biggest lesson he takes away is pluralism: a skepticism towards schematizers who want to build an entire society according to any one uniform blueprint, or any hegemonic organizational model. It’s this quality in Ostrom that made me include a C4SS study on her in my series on “Anarchists Without Adjectives” (I know she wasn’t an anarchist). Like Kropotkin and Ward, she had a fondness for the particularity and sense of place of all the different ad hoc experiments in cooperative organization that ordinary people have come up with in the nooks and crannies of history, and a faith and openness in whatever arrangements people happen to come up with when dealing with one another as equals.

At the same time, as a Marxist, Wall subjects her to some criticism. Ostrom failed to pay adequate attention — or much at all — to the class dimension in history. She treated issues like the workability of the commons as primarily a difference in ideas or understanding, a matter simply of showing where people like Hardin were mistaken and correcting his ideas, when in fact the driver of Enclosure historically has not been any disinterested concern for “efficiency” but rather naked power interest — with “thinkers” like Hardin serving, to borrow a phrase from Marx, as hired prize-fighters on behalf of the propertied classes. I noted this unfortunate tendency myself in researching my study of Ostrom: for example her dismissal as “conspiracy theories” of the suggestions that World Bank loans and other foreign aid served mainly the imperialist goals of integrating the Global South into the global system of corporate power.

Nevertheless, from Wall’s Marxist perspective and from other postcapitalist and anarchist perspectives, Ostrom’s functional analysis of commons and other institutions is of great value to those of us thinking about what kind of society we want to build in the future. Wall notes that Marx himself “in his later writings became more and more interested in the indigenous and actual working commons.” For example, he acknowledged late in life that open field systems like the Russian Mir might develop directly into components of a socialist society, without being amalgamated (on the later Soviet model) into state property under professional administrators.

Photo by derekbruff

The post Book of the Day: Elinor Ostrom’s Rules for Radicals, by Derek Wall appeared first on P2P Foundation.

AL: Firstly, I want to express my deep gratitude for Tamera, for the pioneering research you are doing here, and for doing this work for so long, in the face of a slow-moving, defensive culture. This is my third time here and every time I’m back, I feel more immersed in the field that you’ve co-created. There are two related questions that I want to start with: (1) how do we expand this field of healing and solidarity, both vertically and horizontally (2) and what do you think needs to happen globally in order for these ideas to become widely accepted?

Dieter Duhm during an interview.

DD: Thank you for being here. What has to be done to spread the ideas for an intact Earth are two things: first, the proper utilization of our global information system – the Internet and other media – for spreading basic information in service of human liberation from the existing systems of political power. That is one global track we need to establish everywhere, in a language that can be understood everywhere. At the same time, there is another level where certain groups on Earth transform their inner system of life, where the inner issues of sex, love, partnership, community, authority, power are being solved. These are groups that find this place of truth within themselves and between each other, where all those interpersonal struggles are being worked on. We need both, the two levels – the new groups for this inner anchor and a global information field for the anchor in the world.

AL: Is it possible that this can happen in the next twenty years? Are you hopeful?

DD: I only know that this is absolutely necessary. I personally am hopeful but I realize how long this kind of change takes. Building the global field for the new information has so far always failed due to the conflicts within the groups. I have for many years been active in the Marxist movement, in the German student movement. I realized we can never establish the Marxist struggle against the imperialist economy so long as people in the movement fight each other. It’s been the same for fifty years.

Sculpture shows the sign for Tamera and the Healing Biotopes Plan at the shore of Tamera’s big lake.

I believe that we, as humanity, are at a place in our evolution where the shift can happen really quickly. We are in the midst of a transformational process that is accelerating exponentially. Many people are already experiencing this transformation. We are reaching the point where we can start to communicate about this and share wisdom among these new nodal points of change. In that sense, I am hopeful.

AL: Yes, hope seems to be the only path. Despair is a luxury for the privileged. There’s the old Buckminster Fuller line: we have a choice between utopia or oblivion. Do you think our option set is this binary?

DD: Buckminster Fuller was totally right in this place. Either we come to utopia or we will perish. There is no third way. A large part of our intellectual culture tries to find a third path, like the Social Democratic parties. They neither want concrete utopia nor to perish, but there is no other way. We are globally at the place of total decision. Humanity is unequivocally at this decision-making point.

AL: In some ways, the reformists and the liberals are more the problem than the Rightwing reactionaries. I’m sure you’re familiar with Oscar Wilde’s line from The Soul of Man Under Socialism where he said that the worst slave owners were the ones who treated their slaves well because they actually removed their conditions for emancipation.

DD: Intelligent, violent rule uses sugar, and only afterwards the whip. First, they feed you sugar so you will obey; however, if you don’t obey, you will be eliminated. In that regard, the statement is true but only partially so. I am still glad that slaves aren’t treated as brutally. Sometimes I’m happy that there is still a liberal system in Germany. It’s difficult to accept, but in some ways, those are the buffers that still save us from the worst at the moment. It doesn’t matter how hypocritical they are. This is still a buffer for the existing society so that not everything falls into catastrophe right away.

AL: What were the key moments that allowed you to arrive at your personal philosophy? How did you become free – intellectually, spiritually, etc.?

DD: My childhood was difficult. After the Second World War, my family had to flee from Berlin to Southern Germany, and when we got there, near Lake Constance, the parents told their children, “Drive out those refugee children.” The parents had nothing to eat and the neighbors vented their anger against us. And the neighbor’s children persecuted us. They treated us in an incredibly terrible way. They undressed us and threw us into the nettles and put tar on us. They tied us to a pole and threw shit at us, and such things. There wasn’t the possibility for a refugee child to get out of this situation. And at the same time, I kept going back to these strawberries, and the flowers in the fields. And the little Viola flowers at the side of the cereal fields. This was my home, in Nature, and this is where I encountered God. And through these experiences I knew, in addition to the cruelty of this world, there is healing, there is this higher power, and I followed it.

I always wanted to go back to Nature, to the places where there were no people so I could find this connection with God again. Until God told me, “Now you need to go to the people”. And so, I learned to do that too.

AL: This connection between struggle and liberation and politics and spirituality, how do you see this playing out in the global political field? What needs to happen?

DD: We need to enter into the universal field of healing, of life, in which all living beings are interconnected. We call this field the “sacred matrix.” We need to know that. We need to know that, for example, the peace community of San José de Apartadó [based in Colombia], are connected with this healing field. And then we need a group of people here that comes together in that knowledge and sends them a message. A message that reminds the people over there, telling them, “You are part of this healing field.”

Healing also consists of connecting with this healing field itself. That is the miracle of Life. What we need to do is to globalize the miracle of Life. Yes, we need to globalize the miracle of life. The original power field of Life has to be opened to the whole planet. It is of course there anyway, but we need to connect with it consciously. We need to activate it by manifesting it in real communities. That’s a political task of a new kind. If a small but critical mass does this, then the global healing field will be activated. It’s very simple and very possible, and of course, we have no other choice but to make this happen.

AL: In some ways, this is the message for the ones who want to listen, but what would you say to the power elites, the one percenters?

DD:  We don’t need to tell them anything special. We want to create a global morphogenetic field based on the sacred matrix that’s capable of overcoming the existing system. The other thing is – the members of the “one percent” are also just humans. Some of them will realize early enough that it’s good to change sides and support the new system. In the gatherings we are hosting in Portugal, Colombia and the United States, we often have high-ranking representatives of the existing system who know very well that global capitalism has become untenable. We have to build a public lobby that can be heard, a lobby that’s a bit stronger than the NGO complex and is focused on supporting Life.

We need to set an example in the public conscience for an efficient political power which is no longer an opposition, neither inside nor outside of parliament. This belongs to the past. Le Corbusier, the famous architect, said, “We make the revolution by offering the solution.” So, lets find a group of influential people that collaborate in the solution.

AL: I’d like to pivot to a more controversial question: what do you think the role of psychedelics are in the revolution?

DD: Humanity has had a culture of sacraments, medicines and drugs throughout history. We need a sensible continuation of the global traditions of medicine that we’ve had all over the Earth. The question is: which plants, and under which circumstances?

I think that groups that want to reconnect with the universal consciousness should work with the helping agents in a very conscious and ritualistic way. This is how it’s always been. In most cultures, a symbiotic relationship with medical plants is normal. What is abnormal is the life we are leading in the West, the mental sickness of our times, and the collective abuse of the sacred plants.

We now need to translate the experiential content of the medicine work and shamanic practices into real social structures and continuous Life practices, into genuine spirituality.

AL: Let’s transition to what might seem a more banal question in a place like Tamera. I know you spend a lot of time exploring the role of Eros here. Why do you think that the Left resists it so much?

DD: This may sound like I’m avoiding the question but bear with me. It could be related to the biography of certain key characters in the historical trajectory of the Left. For example, Karl Marx had a housekeeper, a woman, where he lived in Trier, that he desired for years.  As he was walking up and down his carpet, developing his thoughts, he was probably deeply repressed [laughter]. He couldn’t deal with his own sexuality. And he’s just one of many unembodied men who transposed their pathologies into their writings, in the cannon of Leftist thought.

Leftist dogma has been so limited by Dialectical Materialism. The theory didn’t leave any space for the woman, for the body, for Eros. They really believed that with their concept of political economy, they would be able to change the world. But it was written by a sexually repressed young Marx in Trier, to the foibles and limitations of human experience. It’s incredible how much global movements or ideas can be bound to a single person.

AL: I can only imagine what it must have been like in post-World War II Germany, being as liberated as you were, to hold these types of ideas. Now, forty years later, do you feel like the world is catching up or do you feel a mounting sense of frustration?

DD: I didn’t know that it would take so much time. I was totally frustrated for many years, yes.I couldn’t relate to most of my comrades in Germany, and I don’t think they understood my ideas. When I wrote the book Fear in Capitalism in 1972, it became a best-seller, and was widely read among Leftist circles in Germany. I thought that was an opening to a broader discourse. But all of the books that followed were just rejected. It was a collective rejection. It was a defense against specific insights in the realm of sexuality and our inner driving powers. They were based on a different emphasis than simply rational economics.

My thoughts didn’t fit with the thoughts of consensus culture. I felt like a singularity. I was a lone rider, a crazy. Year after year, I needed to see how I could stay faithful to my path, how I could continue. And Sabine helped me [Sabine Lichtenfelds is Dieter’s life partner and the co-founder of Tamera].

I was never just simply frustrated though. It was more complex than that. I knew at some point there would be a change and now the shift is happening, there is a lot of work to be done. And it’s exciting. There are many co-workers here who look forward to this work. Tamera and I are in a new situation. The next generation is taking the reins – they understand the critique of the existing system and they are embodying the solutions.

AL: Do you have any sense of regret, or lessons, in the way you’ve lived your political life?

DD: No, I don’t have regrets in a linear sense. Perhaps I wasn’t courageous enough in some ways. I regret that I had such a thin skin, that I didn’t have enough power to accelerate the process. I made so many mistakes that I don’t regret [laughter]. You know, if you’ve been misunderstood and harvest negative projections all the time, you get angry. You condemn other people, you go in this hostility state. I wish I didn’t treat anyone unjustly on this path. And if I did, well sometimes, there was no other way and I am sorry.

AL: For me and many activists of this next generation, we see what you’ve done as the hugely courageous and radical, especially in the context and era that you did it in.

DD: It’s hard to say.

At some point, I realized, my life is guided. I no longer needed to do the exercise of courage, but I needed to agree to what was required of me, the decisions that were required of me. The decision to step out of my profession, to give away my possessions, to let go of my marriage, and to do all these things at once was a decision I had to make. But I didn’t need courage. It was just like it was.

AL: So the courage to be carried and the courage to choose Life is the ultimate courage?

DD: Yes, if you want to say that. We do need that kind of courage, yes.

International peace pilgrimage in Israel-Palestine in 2007, initiated by Tamera.

DD: To help establish the new infrastructure, the new systems. To help establish the network according to where your talents are and your joys. To help build communities around the world. The new system consists of these two tracks: the upper and the lower, the spiritual and the political. We must help create communication between these two tracks. We must create a new language that brings these two tracks together. And we must show our solidarity for the various resistances that are actively protecting the sacred. When communities in places like Standing Rock start to see that we are standing with them, they will see that they are embedded in an international community. Together we can reconnect with the original power field of Life. If we can start to believe again in this planetary community then a global field will arise in which Indigenous knowledge can come together with a futurological perspective. And that is a great vision to serve.

AL: Deep gratitude to you and Sabine, and thank you for blazing the trail for all of us.

Cross-posted from Kosmos Online

All images courtesy Tamera

About the Author

Alnoor Ladha, Co-founder, Executive Director – The Rules (www.therules.org)

Alnoor’s work focuses on the intersection of political organizing, storytelling and technology. He is a founding member and the Executive Director of /The Rules (/TR), a global network of activists, organizers, designers, coders, researchers, writers and others dedicated to changing the rules that create inequality and poverty around the world.

Photo by RAM DAIRY

The post The Deschooling Dialogues: An Interview with Dr. Dieter Duhm appeared first on P2P Foundation.

They are in effect becoming ‘corporate sovereigns’ with transnational power that dwarfs the power of progressive cities and declining nation-states. Surely, the authoritarian solutions of the emerging national-populists are not the right response to this, and similarly, we believe that left-populist attempts that merely want to revive a more welfare-oriented nation-state are not the right response, especially in the context of global environmental crisis.

In some paradoxical sense, we believe there is a silver lining to this because these practises shed new light on an old debate between the emancipatory traditions of the left, namely the discussion on the ‘withering away’ of the state.

In the 19th century already, anarchists claimed that the state should be abolished forthwith, to be replaced by the ‘free association’ of collectives representing free producers. But the marxists argued, in my view correctly, that in any unequal society, abolishing the systemic role of the state in maintaining equilibrium, is simply a recipe for replacing public power with the raw power of a privately militarized ruling class (paramilitary militias, etc.. ). While anarchists imagined that the homeless would squat empty housing without police opposition, the reality is more likely to be that they would be murdered by paramilitaries in employ of the owner class.

Hence the idea of the withering away of the state. In this scenario, the working class movements would either gradually (the social-democratic version) or more forcefully and directly, take over state power, but with the clear aim of gradually replacing state functions (this was expressed by Marx in his two-stage theory, whereby socialism is still marked by both the logic of exchange and the role of the state, and only the second stage is characterized by a complete disappearance of a separate state function).

Ironically, the paradox today is that this more radical scenario is now echoed in the tactics of the corporate sovereigns AND the libertarian inspired token economy! Through the superior efficiency of their model of ‘privatized mutualization’ ( i.e. private platforms that efficiently bring together supply and demand), their control over user data and capacity to nudge human behavior, as well as their ability to directly syphon ‘surplus value’ through these platforms, they are performing formerly public functions (think about ridesharing competing with public transport or deregulated house-sharing replacing regulated hotels, etc..). The whole world is becoming a shopping mall, with free speech and other rights eroded through the absolute rights of private property.

A “withering of the State” is no longer the sole province of utopian scenarios. In fact, the invasive and deregulatory practises of netarchical platforms show what a dystopian dismantling of the State looks like. In contrast, at the P2P Foundation we contend that there is a way to hack this process toward better futures, futures where emancipatory forces can increasingly take over bureaucratised state functions while solving environmental and equity issues in the process. Indeed, civic initiatives, concerned about the social and environmental equilibrium of urban life, are also showing functional governance at work! Precisely because cooperative forms of governance and ownership can retain the surplus for their own development and to create livelihoods for their contributors, they show promise to outcooperate netarchical platforms, especially if they can form cooperative eco-systems.

We outlined such a scenario in our recent report, Changing Societies through Urban Commons Transitions.

As we discovered in our mapping and study of 500 urban commons in the Flemish city of Ghent, nearly all provisioning systems (mobility, housing, etc.) are now covered by still marginal, but growing emerging commons-centric alternatives. In Ghent and the Flanders, as in other cities and regions of Europe, there is a tenfold increase of commons-based initiatives in the last ten years. However, unlike the private platforms, they are undercapitalized, and often fragmented.

How can this fragmentation be solved ?

Here is our proposal:

• Imagine that for every provisioning system, there exists open source software depositories needed to organize such provisioning, a kind of github for MuniRide and FairBnB type solutions
• In order to finance and scale these solutions, we propose alliances of cities, cooperatives, and even unions, to create the material conditions for global scaling of peer to peer and commons-based solutions
• Locally, say at the city or bioregional levels, the local versions of these coalitions create multi-stakeholder owned and governed platform cooperatives. These platform coops use the global software depositories but adapt and change them to the local contexts and necessities, but also contribute on making the common codebase better and better, adding more and more functionalities over time. Note that all the platform surplus can now be re-invested, not as dividends for remote owners, but in the common development of the infrastructure and in better livelihoods for all contributors.
• The fourth level then, is not just exchange, but actual production. Indeed, at this stage urban commons are distributing differently but not producing the goods themselves. However, we envisage a cosmo-local production system, in which the global commons described above, are matched with local and redistributed production through microfactories, which are also open cooperatives, i.e coops that do not just capture value from their own members, but are committed to create commons that benefit the wider community.

I have no doubt that in these endeavours, we can learn a lot from the development of the private platform and extractive token economies, as we can redesign the tokens for contributory justice, while also being conscious of reducing the human footprint on nature. The good news is that cooperative mutualization can achieve that. Mutualization of physical infrastructures is the golden way to reducing the human footprint, and it can be combined with more just distribution of rewards, while also guaranteeing the full sharing of knowledge.

The key to success, in our opinion, is to think trans-locally and transnationally!

To summarize the spatial or geographic logic of our approach:

• Local, urban, bioregional initiatives produce and exchange for social need close to their user base
• But they use trans-local and trans-national knowledge bases
• Participants produce locally, but can organize trans-national and equitable knowledge-guilds and global transnational entredonneurial coalitions

The role of progressive majorities at the nation-state level is to strengthen these local and trans-national infrastructures, and to create enduring socially just and environmentally balanced provisioning systems that, through their functional — but in this case also democratic — ‘commons governance, can outperform private, extractive, transnational power structures. In order to do this, the state has to be transformed into a partner state, that insures the meta-governance at the territorial level. A ‘partner state’ is not a transition which requires a magical transformation of the current state apparatus from one day to the next. It could take the form of a progressive coalition’s growing commitment to endorse and facilitate functional governance arrangements that are participatory, democratic and managed through public-commons governance arrangements. The Partner State also applies to any interstitial area of governmental structure, at every level, where sympathetic functionaries and politicians can be found to support commons-oriented alternatives; think of Partner towns, cities, bioregions or larger transnational structures To the degree that cooperative and public-commons forms of provisioning are initiated and grow, we will succeed in a withering away of bureaucratic and authoritarian state functions, by more democratic forms rooted in civil society participation.

But note that we stress the role and function of new trans-national structures beyond the nation-state in this process of transformation.

Indeed,

1. classical industrial capitalism can be considered to be a three-in-one integrated structure of capital-state-nation, to which the double-movement logic uncovered by Karl Polanyi applied:
2. Meaning that, whenever the market function ‘freed’ itself from state and civic regulation, it destabilized society, leading to popular mobilizations to re-embed the market into society
3. However, with trans-nationalized capital, nation-state regulation is now enfeebled, and both right-wing national populism and left-wing social populism have failed to show a way forward
4. Then it follows that to substantively re-balance our societies, we need counter-hegemonic power at the trans-national, trans-local level

The good news is that these powers are emerging:

• Global open source communities and other global productive communities based on peer to peer dynamic and the commons are on the rise;
• Global entrepreneurial coalitions have formed around these open source knowledge bases, and a growing fraction of these are consciously generative coalitions, seeking to generate support for the commons and the livelihoods of the commoners
• Global coalitions of cities (and coops, unions, ethical capital) can perform the common good function at this trans-national level, creating global trusts that underwrite these new commons-based global infrastructures

This is Functional Governance 3.0, a withering of the state that is democratically accountable beyond the nation-state level.

Photo by Nathan Laurell

The post Withering Away of the State 3.0. appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Aaron Bastani: The coming out party for climate change as an issue of global relevance was the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. Since then, the relationship between energy and the economy has only become more political, with citizens across the Global North and South ever more aware of the challenges it poses. In fact, a 2017 poll conducted by Pew across 38 countries showed 61% of respondents view climate change as a major concern, placing it above traditional geopolitics, migration and a failing economic model in terms of perceived threat.

And yet increased public awareness over the last quarter of a century has failed to translate into meaningful action. Atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide (CO₂), the principle ‘greenhouse gas’, were 61% higher in 2013 than they were in 1990. The years following the economic crisis of 2008 saw the largest annual emission increases in history.

But there isn’t just a dissonance between our knowledge of the facts and how we act. There’s also the problem of our inability to model the future with accuracy.

At present the scientific consensus is that two degrees of warming this century is highly likely. While this would present a huge shock to the global order, with unseen levels of migration, declining crop yields and a massive resource crunch, if that was as bad as it got, we would have had a lucky escape.

The reason is that anything much beyond that would see us reach a tipping point. Here a cascade of feedbacks, including desertification and methane hydrate release, would see three degrees lead to four, four to five, and five to six.

Could humanity endure a world six degrees warmer than at present? Perhaps, but with oceans too warm and acidic to maintain life, mass agriculture only possible around the north and south poles, and elevated levels of atmospheric methane – posing problems for anything that breathes – it’s difficult to imagine.

An eternal present: the tyranny of capitalist realism.

How is it possible that ever more people are aware of climate change, as well as its potentially devastating consequences, and yet so little is done? The answer is politics.

Future generations will look back on the the last 25 years and isolate two things in particular. The first is a dramatic increase in carbon dioxide emissions – and with it a further acceleration in global warming. The second is a particular economic model, globalised not only in terms of trade and production, but more importantly a framework which places profit above all else and demands circulation.

This should be understood as ‘contemporary globalisation’, something distinct from the geographical process of the same name – concurrent with it – which unfolds instead as a ‘time-space compression’ made possible by changing technologies.

Contemporary globalisation was an intentional political settlement, founded on a certain set of ideas, and while it maps over the technological and geographical phenomenon, the latter could well have developed without the former.

For contemporary globalisation the end of the Cold War was decisive, with the institutions of mid-century Western capitalism – the IMF, the WTO and the World Bank – combining with a new cultural zeitgeist of capitalist realism – the idea that the end of the world was more possible than the end of capitalism. Here, free markets were no longer understood to be a socially contingent systems, but instead the entirety of reality. The synthesis of these two elements, added to the historic absence of a competing utopia or countervailing geopolitical forces, drove a second belle epoque between 1990 and 2008. Here a specific economic system, based on constantly expanding global markets and the elimination of all friction in circulation (be it cultural, technological or economic), was crucial.

Unsurprisingly, it was primarily in the affluent countries of the Global North where capitalist realism reigned supreme. For developing nations history remained far from over, with the operative logic instead being to pursue higher standards of living, rising wages and greater prosperity. An increasingly integrated global economy, particularly after 1990, permitted the two to fit like pieces of a jigsaw: the cheap labour of a rising China in the Global South made possible the psychic economy of capitalist realism in the Global North. The former got richer, the latter felt richer. In Marxist terms, the base of the Global South made possible the superstructure of the wealthier nations.

And for a while it worked.

But in terms of climate change, this economic and cultural settlement – based on consent as much as coercion – allowed market-based solutions to remain unquestioned until after the crisis of 2008, even when it was clear they weren’t even touching the surface.

While climate change might be a result of industrial modernity, or ‘fossil capitalism’ as Andreas Malm refers to it, for the true believers that was irrelevant. To the contrary, it in fact compounded a blind faith in the ability of technology to solve almost any problem. Just as Watt’s coal-powered steam engine transformed society at the turn of the nineteenth century, similarly green technologies would underpin a similar transition in our own time. The limits of growth would expand once more. After all, capitalism was reality, history was over and nothing really changes.

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That set of presumptions, where changes in technology maintain capitalism’s ability to sustain the planet regardless, is referred to as the ‘technological fix’. This often comes in the form of carbon sequestration, geo-engineering and renewables – or a combination of all three.

The technological fix seeks to negate politics by claiming one can change social reality without changing social relations: the rich need not be less rich, disparities in income need not be reduced, consumption of goods and services need not diminish. Faced with an economic system which has failed to deliver rising living standards, this is why self-proclaimed moderates cry “innovation!” This is not a moderate position – it is a zealous one.

To an extent, there is some reason to this line of argument. Humanity, so far at least, has been able to overcome every challenge it has faced, from deadly microbes to larger predators and the turbulence of several ice ages. Each time we have not only prevailed but thrived, primarily as a result of our ability to process information and create tools – technology – in response.

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Historically, the green movement has disdained the reasoning of the technological fix, and rightly so. For the most part those pursuing them in relation to the climate – with madcap schemes like blocking part of the sun with a ‘space shade’ in order to manage solar radiation, or removing vast amounts of CO₂from the atmosphere through carbon sequestration – don’t want to save the planet, but instead prolong the economic and social system which is killing it – one based on production for exchange, profit and work.

Green politics, at its most radical, has thus insisted that an adequate response must be more fundamental. Within this was an implicit understanding of how history unfolds and change takes place. So while technological determinists understand technology as the driving force of history, and thus the only way to address climate change, radical greens understand social relations and ideas, or even relations to nature, as what really matters.

In this respect, both sides exhibit a bias. But to change history and save the world, this isn’t enough.

How we make history.

The best way to understand technology, how it internalises and shapes social relations in culture, society and the economy, is to view it as one element within a broader ensemble through which history evolves. This is how David Harvey reads the thinking of Karl Marx on the topic – with the author of Capital understanding history as constituted through six distinct but mutually adaptive fields. These are technology, nature, the process of production, the reproduction of daily life, social relations and mental conceptions. All are in dynamic tension, each constantly shaping and being shaped by all the others.

Marx wanted to understand how history was made in order to change it: “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it”. When you think about history as something that complex, and generated by fields which each encompass so much, you soon grasp the limits of emphasising only one.

Elon Musk, for instance, would say technology determines history, as would capitalist realism more generally. This allows it to frame constructed political realities as natural and unchanging. Meanwhile an eco-anarchist might say nature and social relations are all important: maybe if we were all vegan and cycled we would save the planet. Alternatively, Lenin would have said the production process is primary, and that without significant change there the rest is meaningless.

For Marx, however, systemic transformation – what he referred to as moving to a ‘new mode of production’ – would necessitate dealing with all of these categories together. So just as capitalism, defined by production for exchange and wage labour, emerged slowly over a period of centuries, so too would whatever succeeds it. As post-capitalists, and as humans who want to stop runaway climate change, this must inform how we now act.

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Given the timeframe within which we are now operating (we have around three decades to completely decarbonise global production while energy demand doubles), this won’t be easy. The answer is to emphasise each moment as part of a broader shift, with the need for new technologies, social relations, mental conceptions, work flows and conceptions of nature. No one sphere is sufficient.

While that might sound extremely hard, a lot of work has already been done. The work of animal rights activists and movements around changed eating habits mean that many now enjoy a very different relationship to nature. And even those of us who are not vegetarian or vegan would find the Cartesian view of other animal species as automatons not only strange but inhumane. One of the major changes in dealing with climate change will be changes in food production and consumption, with meat in particular using prolific amounts of water and land, and generating significant greenhouse gases like methane. That’s not to mention the ethics of animals as commodities.

In response, expect vegetarianism and veganism to become increasingly common in the coming decades. In addition to changed conceptions of nature, changing technology manifesting those conceptions will also matter as, in the coming years, meat substitutes become increasingly authentic and synthetic meat – flesh without animals – finds a mass market. Using far less water and land, and creating far less methane as a by-product, synthetic meat is a far more efficient conversion of solar energy to food than rearing animals – something will probably be mocked in the not-too-distant future.

Meanwhile renewable technologies are making massive leaps forward, as is energy storage. A world which has completely decarbonised production at some point in the twenty-first century is not the wet dream of tech optimists, but seemingly inevitable when you look at the falling cost of PV and wind technologies as a consequence of experience curves. The point, then, is how quickly they are rolled out and who owns them.

Similar questions will need to be answered regarding artificial intelligence, data more generally, and extracting resources beyond our planet. All of these are coming, and with them a new civilisational paradigm – as disruptive as the steam engine coupled with fossil fuels was at the dawn of the industrial revolution. What matters, for post-capitalists, is whether or not we bend the arc of history to ensure that the dividend of these technologies redounds to the emancipation of all of us – not enhancing the profits of a tiny few.

Importantly, in relation to renewable energy, diffusion needs to happen as a matter of urgency. If it doesn’t, warming in excess of two degrees seems close to certain.

Small is beautiful, big is beautiful.

Historically, all of this is anathema to the best traditions of the green movement which, since the early 1970s, have persisted with the idea of growth having limits and the importance of localising production and leading very different kinds of lives.

While it’s true that your morning commute is inefficient in every sense, and you purchase many things you don’t really need, the idea that the answer to climate change is consuming less energy – that a shift to renewables will necessarily mean a downsizing in life – feels wrong. In fact, the trends with renewables would point to the opposite: the sun furnishes our planet with enough energy to meet humanity’s annual demand in just 90 minutes. Rather than consuming less energy, developments in wind and solar (and within just a few decades) should mean distributed energy of such abundance that we won’t know what to do with it. When combined with the technologies of artificial intelligence, robots with strong sensory-motor coupling and asteroid mining, you suddenly see a society beyond scarcity in energy, resources and, most importantly, labour.

Fully automated luxury communism is green populism.

This is the vision that must be offered in response to climate change. One that accepts changed relationships to nature, especially other creatures, but which demure from green-primitivism or going ‘back to the land’. For those who do so, it will be a matter of choice rather than necessity.

In this world we need not travel less, nor no longer enjoy crops and foodstuffs from other parts of the planet. Quite the opposite – seeing the great feats of humanity and the beauty of the Earth will be the birthright of all. Life will be easier with ever more time given over to leisure rather than work. What would be the meaning of life? Well, that would be for you to decide.

This is a populist vision that understands the potentials of the present that is soon to come, seeking to shift them to a higher purpose. Fully automated luxury communism is not inevitable, and alternative scenarios are possible: rentism and artificial scarcity are just as plausible as abundance; war and mass destruction as likely as permanently cheaper clean energy. Fundamentally, though, any effective green movement must grasp these technologies or lose. Evolution has no reverse.

What’s more, this populism must be global, reconciling the needs and interests of the poorest countries with the wealthiest. The transition to renewable energy in the Global South – which will enjoy the most abundant and cheapest energy anywhere on Earth – will be made possible by technology transfer and reparations for historic injustice through the form of a global carbon tax. Decarbonising the economy won’t just save the planet, rich and poor, it will give electricity to the hundreds of millions in sub-saharan Africa and South Asia currently without it. It will underpin a level of technological catch-up unthinkable to those who associate large, centralised infrastructures with energy generation and distribution.

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But this populism will need to be pitted against contemporary globalisation, whose model privileges the free movement of goods and capital over people, and whose emphasis on borderless trade – often the default even among leftists – is the essence of the commodity fetish. This model has limited the possibility of states to decarbonise at speed, often through procurement rules centred around fair competition, something well documented by Naomi Klein in her book This Changes Everything.

Woke globalisation will not deliver the change we need, whether its environmental or economic, and a longing to break with the established order must be conjoined with the impulse to create energy abundance by moving away from fossil fuels. As Paul Mason writes:

“From George Square in Glasgow to Syntagma Square in Athens, there was always a Catalan flag waving above the crowd. I never understood until now that those flags were an essential part of the story. The “breakup” narratives of modern Europe – whether they are pulling away from nation states, currencies, free movement zones or the EU itself – are all driven by a central fact: the current settlement does not work.”

Pretending otherwise is woefully inadequate, and any green populism, at the micro or macro-level, must be alive to that. A break with fossil fuels and neoliberalism must also be a break with the current global order.

The final aspect of green populism is the recognition that states matter, and electoralism is important. For much of the last several decades, the green movement has favoured small-scale, local projects, with genres of activism which favour self-transformation, experimental togetherness and immediacy. All of this is worthwhile, and should not be dispensed with, but radical greens must understand that only states, the greatest instruments of collective action yet created by humans, can pull off what is needed.

So what does ‘pulling it off’ look like? It means the Global North completely decarbonising by 2030 and the Global South by 2040. This means countries across Europe and North America will need to reduce CO2 emissions every year by 8% in the 2020s, with the same holding true for poorer countries over the following decade.

This will require huge levels of consent, alongside the mobilisation of states in something akin to a war effort. Fortunately, people need jobs – until robots perfect sensory-motor coupling – and there are many public goods like universal health, education and housing, which should be folded within a broader project for ecological transformation and social renewal.

Populism doesn’t mean bowing to the lowest common denominator. It means seeing what people want and relaying it through a technological paradigm whose social relations are yet to be decided. It means saying ‘here is a path to limitless abundance’, rather than calling for civilisation to be placed in a straight jacket.

By understanding history as evolutionary flow, we can continue to build that project in the now – in ideas, in production and consumption models, in relations, and in technologies. Importantly, however, this must be combined with a vision of progress and inevitable destiny, with the incumbent organisations of democratic representation – states, unions and parties – the handmaidens to a radically different world.

Originally published in Novara Media.
Photo by ▓▒░ TORLEY ░▒▓

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